By Leslie Griffin, Havnot Observer Arts Correspondent

It is not every weekend that Havnot finds itself at the centre of an international cultural exchange. Yet this past Friday and Saturday, our village played host to the Aberporth Male Voice Choir, a distinguished Welsh ensemble whose visit will be remembered for many years, especially by those present at the Dolphin on Friday evening, and by Mr Horace Palmer, who remembers selected portions of it (but only with the aid of witnesses).

The exchange began, as many great ventures do, with an email. This email, addressed to “Dear Solent Friends,” was interpreted by Mr Dennis Ackland, Musical Director of the Havnot Male Voice Choir, as a communication of profound significance.

Some have suggested that the invitation may originally have been intended for the Solent Male Voice Choir. Mr Ackland dismissed this as “unhelpful literalism,” noting that Havnot is, broadly speaking, within the cultural orbit of the Solent, if one is generous with maps and conscience.

A reception was arranged for Friday evening at the Dolphin Hotel. This was chosen over the Little John because the Little John’s back room can accommodate only one male voice choir at a time without oxygen deprivation setting in.

The Dolphin, under its proprietor Gregory Sandlelace, rose handsomely to the occasion. Mr Sandlelace had obtained a full barrel of Fuzzy Tongue from Havnot Brewery, described as “robust, amber, and best approached with an adult present.” The Welsh visitors approached it with admirable seriousness. The barrel was empty within approximately half an hour, causing Mr Sandlelace to stand beside it in silent commercial grief, wishing that he had purchased a additional three.

Members of HMVC naturally attempted to match their guests in hospitality. Mr Palmer and Mr Abe Appleford were particularly committed, though by eight-thirty Mr Palmer had retired beneath a side table for what he later described as “a tactical inspection of the carpet,” while Mr Appleford had begun addressing everyone, including a lampshade, as “boyo.”

This prompted a firm intervention from Mr Kevin Keen. He was heard to hiss “Abe, you’re not Welsh!” to which Abe replied “I am tonight, Boyo!”

The formal programme began with a quiz prepared by Mr Lionel P. Hargreaves, D.Mus. Questions included “Name three composers influenced by the Oxford Movement but not aesthetically dependent upon it,” and “Which plainsong mode best expresses eschatological yearning?” This caused such perplexity on the part of both choirs that Mr Dai Evans, conductor of Aberporth MVC, suggested that perhaps the choirs might sing instead, to general relief.

Aberporth sang first. Their chosen item was Myfanwy. I have heard male voice choirs before. (I also practise with online rehearsal tracks and possess a pencil holder that clips to my music. I mark “breaths” and “rests”.) Nevertheless, Aberporth’s singing made one aware that HMVC’s usual approach to ensemble work contains a strong element of hope. The Aberporth tenors rose without strain. The baritones warmed the middle. The basses supported everything like old stone. They ended together, not approximately together, but actually together.

Then HMVC stood to reply.

There was chair noise, and a couple of audible cries of ‘oomph’ as arthritic knees protested at being called into action. Mr Alan Dobbs briefly misplaced page two, though in fairness page two had become attached to page three and was concealed beneath a paper napkin. Mr Appleford whispered, “We’ll give ’em tidy, boyo,” which did not assist concentration.

Our chosen item was Morte Christi. It began promisingly. By bar seven, however, the tenors had developed a melodic disagreement with the printed notes, while the baritones were confident but entirely wrong in a manner which made confidence part of the problem. Mr Palmer, beneath the table, contributed a low note which Mr Ackland later described as “not wholly unwelcome, but geographically misplaced.”

A particular source of interest to the visitors was the presence in our bass section of Ms Paula Jenkins. For readers unfamiliar with Ms Jenkins, she is one of Havnot’s more vivid citizens: a transgender woman of formidable good humour, magnificent mobility scooter, and absolute refusal to be diminished by anybody else’s categories. She was born in Wales, though her family moved to Havnot when she was young, leaving her with Welsh ancestral pride and Havnot opinions.

Her scooter, decorated for the occasion with a small Welsh flag and battery-powered daffodils, had already attracted attention. Her voice attracted more. When she entered on the bass line, she did so with a rumble that a diesel locomotive would have thought impressive. The Aberporth men visibly recalculated several assumptions at once. Accustomed though they were to strong characters, the had plainly not budgeted for Paula Jenkins in full ceremonial plumage. One tenor dropped his programme. Mr Dai Evans, however, looked first surprised, then delighted.

Afterwards he approached her and said, “Madam, that was a splendid entry.”

“Born with it,” said Paula.

There was a brief silence, during which several men looked as though they were trying to work out which conversational road was safest.

“My father was from Aberaeron,” she added. “My mother from Cardigan. Then they moved here, poor souls. I’ve been in exile ever since, though Havnot has certain compensations. Level pavements are not, however, among them.”

At this, Dai laughed, and the tension evaporated. Within minutes he and Paula were discussing Welsh cakes, chapel harmonies, childhood holidays, and whether a choir without at least one complicated family story could truly call itself Welsh. Paula declared that she contained “several choirs’ worth of complicated family story,” and was therefore over-qualified.

Lionel then offered what he called “a respectful pianistic tribute to Welsh hymnody” by playing Llanfair on the Dolphin’s upright piano. This was to a new arrangement by one L.P. Hargreaves D.Mus. It produced considerable emotion. Unfortunately, the emotion was laughter. Within moments the entire visiting choir had dissolved into helpless mirth. Mr Hargreaves closed the piano lid with controlled violence and remarked that the Welsh had always been “temperamentally resistant to improvement.”

By the end of the soiree, negotiations had taken place concerning Saturday’s concert at St Faithful’s. It was agreed, with great tact, that Aberporth would sing the majority of the programme, HMVC would contribute two brief items, and both choirs would combine for Hey Jude. HMVC’s contribution to the latter was to be confined to the extended “la-la-la” section. Mr Dobbs asked whether this included “all the la-las or just the safer ones,” which was, under the circumstances, a sensible question.

Saturday’s concert was, to the surprise of some and the relief of many, a genuine success. Aberporth were magnificent. Their discipline was not cold or showy, but generous. They sang as though each man knew both his own part and his responsibility to the person beside him. HMVC, standing among them for the final number, sang better than we often do, perhaps because we had no choice but to follow the Welshmen, whose volume exceeded ours by many decibels.

Ms Jenkins was placed between two Aberporth basses and appeared entirely at home, her Welsh flag hung over her shoulder like a standard-bearer at full charge. Mr Appleford stayed remarkably close to pitch - or at least not actually on another pitch altogether. This was considered progress. Mr Dobbs remained mostly on the right page. Mr Palmer, fully restored, supplied several notes of genuine structural importance.

And when the long ending of Hey Jude arrived, something unexpectedly lovely happened. The Welshmen sang. The Havnot men sang. Paula sang. The congregation sang. Mr Hargreaves played with only moderate disapproval. Mr Ackland conducted as though he’d been invited to lead the Last Night of the Proms.

Afterwards, Mr Evans thanked HMVC for its hospitality, and especially for the small but genuinely appreciated quantity of the Fuzzy Tongue. He was then overheard quietly advising his Concert Secretary, Mr Bryn Jones, to “double-check Solent next time. There really is a Solent Male Voice Choir. I’m told they are quite good.” Accuracy is important in choral correspondence.

But so, too, is accident. For all the confusion, the weekend offered something valuable. Two choirs met: one polished, one not sure what polish is; one disciplined, one held together partly by sandwiches, loyalty, and panic. And somewhere between Myfanwy and Hey Jude, between Aberporth and Havnot, between inherited culture and chosen belonging, we discovered that fellowship is not made by being identical. It is made by standing near enough to hear one another breathe, and then daring, however improbably, to join in.

________________________________________

Enjoyed your visit to Havnot?

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. The meetings, regrettably, are plausible.

If you would like more parish life, more Dobbs, more Judith, more theology, more books, more chaos, or a mug that quietly suggests you have survived a PCC meeting, everything begins here:

https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe

That link will take you to Canon Tom’s books, e-books, audiobook, merchandise and Substack, all gathered together in one slightly alarming but useful place.

Print books are also available — in person only — from St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

A note on AI: ChatGPT (we call him Artie Fischal) is often deployed to add editorial and image value to these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

Sandy Lintel had been curate at St Faithful’s long enough to know that “I thought we might try something interactive” should be approached cautiously.

Nevertheless, she had prepared carefully.

At the back of church, beneath the noticeboard and just left of the radiator that only worked when no one needed it, Sandy had arranged a prayer station: smooth stones, ribbons, a small wooden cross, a tray of sand, and cards printed with gentle lettering:

LEAVE HERE WHAT WEIGHS HEAVILY ON YOUR HEART.

Sandy stood back, pleased. It looked prayerful. Then Dobbs arrived.

“What’s this?”

“A prayer station.”

Dobbs examined it as though it were an unattended bag.

“Is there a timetable?”

“No.”

“Then station may be overstating it.”

Sandy breathed in through her nose.

“People will see it as they arrive,” she said, “and leave behind something that feels heavy.”

Dobbs looked at the stones.

“Those are already heavy.”

“Yes. Symbolically.”

“Ah,” said Dobbs, in the tone of a man who had identified the problem.

By ten o’clock, the church was full enough for Sandy to feel hopeful and empty enough for Judith to describe attendance later as “encouraging, under the circumstances.” Tim was away at a deanery meeting on missional imagination.

So Sandy was presiding.

She welcomed everyone. She explained the prayer station. She used words like “burden”, “release”, and “placing things into God’s hands”. She avoided “liminal”, which no-one understood anyway.

The first person to move was June Mosse, who returned carrying a plastic tub.

“I’ve brought glitter,” June whispered.

“Why?”

“To make it more hopeful.”

Before Sandy could answer, June had added a silver layer to the sand tray, so that the wilderness now resembled a nursery craft incident.

Next came Perry Wainwright. He stood for a long time with a card in his hand. Perhaps beneath the tweed and the chronic belief that church life was improved by subcommittees, there was a man longing to lay something down.

Perry wrote carefully, pinned the card to the prayer net, and returned to his pew.

Sandy glanced at it later.

THE NATIONAL SITUATION.

It had been attached with three drawing pins and a certain assertive violence.

Then Alan Dobbs approached. He did not so much pray as audit. He lifted one stone, weighed it, replaced it somewhere marginally more correct, and reached into his pocket. Out came a key on a piece of string.

“That,” he murmured, placing it beside the cross, “has been troubling me for some time.”

“I’ve no idea what it opens.”

“Still,” said Sandy. “Perhaps that’s a kind of prayer.”

“It might be the boiler cupboard.”

During the second hymn, the children came up. The first placed a sad face beside the stones. The second left a friendship bracelet, which broke Sandy’s heart. The third deposited half a sausage roll.

His mother hissed, “James!”

“It was weighing heavy,” said James.

“It was your snack.”

“Its gone cold.”

Sandy chose not to intervene.

The station had begun to change character. What had started as contemplative space now resembled a vestry drawer after a power cut. There was Perry’s national situation. Dobbs’s possible boiler key. A broken umbrella. Someone had written “knees” on a card. Someone else had written “Barnaby”, which might have been a person or a pet.

Then Horse Palmer came up.

Horse never approached an object without considering whether it needed moving, fixing, or leaning on. Kevin Keen, from the pew behind, watched with the expression of a man silently screaming stop.

Horse produced a small metal hinge. Rusted, heavy, and faintly oily.

He put it beside the cross.

“What’s that, Horace?” Sandy asked softly.

“Gate hinge.”

“And you’re leaving it with God?”

Horse considered this.

“Well,” he said, “God made iron.”

It was at that point that Lionel, watching from the organ bench with increasing despair, began the gradual hymn at a tempo suggesting he’d like to leave as early as possible today.

Sandy preached after the Gospel. She had prepared a careful homily about surrender, silence, and contemplative openness. It had Julian of Norwich in it and one small joke about rotas.

But as she stood in the pulpit and looked at the prayer station — glittering, unstable, smelling faintly of sausage roll — she knew the sermon was no longer true enough.

So she closed her notes.

Judith looked up sharply. Dobbs appeared alarmed.

“I was going to talk,” Sandy said, “about laying down our burdens in a calm, beautiful, well-ordered way.”

She looked at the back of church.

“But apparently we have brought God a broken umbrella, a mysterious key, the national situation, two knees, Barnaby, half a sausage roll, and a gate hinge.”

A ripple of laughter moved through the pews.

“And perhaps that is better. Because most of us do not come to God with our lives arranged like a retreat brochure. We come cluttered. We come with pockets full of things we meant to sort out. We come with anxieties we cannot name, snacks we cannot finish, and bits of old iron from gates that will not hang straight.”

Horse nodded, deeply.

“And God does not wait for us to make it elegant. God receives what we bring. Even if what we bring is ridiculous. Especially then, perhaps.”

For a moment, St Faithful’s was quiet.

Then James whispered, “Can I have my sausage roll back?”

And Sandy, to her own surprise, laughed first.

After the service, Dobbs retrieved the key, having remembered it opened the old vestry cupboard. Perry said the national situation looked slightly better pinned up. June announced that she was more than satisfied with the glitter effect.

Horse reclaimed the hinge.

“I thought you were leaving that with God,” said Kevin.

“I did,” said Horse. “He reminded me where I put the screws.”

Judith came up beside Sandy.

“Well,” she said, “that was nearly a disaster.”

“Yes,” said Sandy.

“In a good way.”

At the back of church, silver glitter shone in the sand like grace among the crumbs.

Later, Dobbs tried to hoover it up and blocked the machine.

________________________________________

Enjoyed your visit to Havnot?

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. The meetings, regrettably, are plausible.

If you would like more parish life, more Dobbs, more Judith, more theology, more books, more chaos, or a mug that quietly suggests you have survived a PCC meeting, everything begins here:

https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe

That link will take you to Canon Tom’s books, e-books, audiobook, merchandise and Substack, all gathered together in one slightly alarming but useful place.

Print books are also available — in person only — from St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

A note on AI: ChatGPT (we call him Artie Fischal) is often deployed to add editorial and image value to these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

Note: This story is a sequel to ‘The Romance Department’ and ‘The Peace Camp in Pew Four’. I suggest you read them first, in that order.

The Dolphin Hotel had once been important, and wanted everyone to know it. It had been a coaching inn in the days when Havnot sat grandly on the turnpike road between Portsmouth and Arundel, and men in capes had arrived in the rain demanding horses, ale, and rooms with less highwayman in them. Fragments of dignity remained: a cracked eighteenth-century mirror, a fireplace large enough to roast a Dissenter, and a staircase which complained in three historical time periods.

Unfortunately, the present had happened.

The Dolphin now smelt faintly of gravy, brass polish, and curtains which had seen things. Its rooms were too large for intimacy and too small for parties. The restaurant, labelled À LA CARTE outside, had four tables, three chandeliers, and the emotional atmosphere of a pension review.

This made it perfect.

No one from St Faithful’s came to The Dolphin unless attending a wake, avoiding one, or collecting an elderly relative who found the Little John “a bit noisy”. Tim and Sybil could therefore meet privately.

Tim arrived ten minutes early; anxiety had punctuality as a side effect. He checked his reflection in the cracked mirror and looked, he thought, like a vicar dressed as a man going to dinner.

Sybil arrived exactly on time, in a green dress, boots, and earrings suggesting peace but not surrender. Tim tried not to stare, failed inwardly, and concluded that Sybil had the alarming quality of looking entirely herself and becoming more attractive by the second. He wondered what on earth she saw in him, a mournful widower, with nothing but a church stipend and a draughty vicarage to offer.

“You came,” said Tim, barely concealing his surprise.

“I said I would.”

“Yes. Of course. I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant” said Sybil, but kindly.

This was already going well, in the sense that Tim had not yet apologised to furniture.

Gregory Sandlelace, owner, manager, maître d’ and complaints department, swept towards them.

“Vicar! Madam! Welcome to The Dolphin’s à la carte Restaurant.”

He pronounced “restaurant” as if applying for funding.

“Mr Sandlelace,” said Tim.

“Gregory, please. We are informal here. Within limits. The specials are on the board, though I recommend not touching the board itself. The chalk has opinions.

“I may say that I’m hopeful that Michelin will soon happen upon our humble restaurant and offer a favourable review.”

Tim found this a highly unlikely scenario, on multiple counts.

“And what an honour it is,” continued Gregory while doing a fair impression of Jane Austen’s Mr Collins, “to have the clergy dining with us. Standards are rising, Vicar. Indeed, I have taken on additional staff today to cope with demand.”

Tim glanced round the empty room.

“Demand?”

“Anticipated demand,” said Gregory.

He showed them to a table beneath the portrait of a naval officer who looked as if he had ordered soup in 1783 and was still waiting.

Tim sat opposite Sybil.

For a moment, they were quiet.

“So,” said Sybil.

“So,” said Tim.

“Christian pacifism.”

“Yes.”

“Not much of a romantic opener, is it?” said Sybil, with a nervous laugh.

“I thought perhaps we might warm up first,” suggested Tim.

“With what?”

“Bread rolls?”

Sybil smiled. It helped.

Then a shadow fell across the table.

“What would Sir and Madam care to order?”

Tim looked up.

Alan Dobbs stood beside them in a black waiter’s waistcoat, bow tie, and the expression of a man who had infiltrated enemy territory. A white towel over his arm gave him dignity he had not earned.

“Dobbs?”

“Good evening, Vicar.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting, sir.”

“Yes, I can see that, but why?”

“I answered an advertisement.”

Sybil leaned back. “For espionage?”

“For part-time hospitality support,” said Dobbs, with the offended dignity of a man caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.

From the kitchen came a crash.

Dobbs froze.

A large head appeared round the door.

“All right,” called Horse. “Only plates.”

Gregory, still hovering nearby, closed his eyes. “That is our new kitchen assistant.”

“Horse?” said Tim.

Horse disappeared.

Sybil looked at Tim. Tim looked at Sybil.

“So much for privacy,” she said, with a sunny smile.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. This is much funnier.”

Dobbs took out a pad.

“Starters?”

Tim, recovering slightly, and with an innate sense of what Dobbs could and couldn’t spell, decided to retaliate.

“I’ll have the bruschetta.”

Dobbs frowned. “Brush what?”

“Bruschetta.”

Dobbs wrote carefully. “Brush shelter.”

Sybil said, “I’ll have the vichyssoise.”

Dobbs stared at her.

“Is that fish?”

“Cold soup.”

“On purpose?”

“Yes.”

Dobbs wrote something which appeared to be “Vicar’s oysters”.

“For mains,” said Tim, “perhaps the coq au vin.”

Dobbs looked pained.

“Cock of van?”

“Coq au vin.”

Dobbs stared at his pad as if French were a personal insult.

“And Madam?”

“The ratatouille.”

Dobbs brightened. “I’ve heard of that. Cartoon rat.”

“Vegetables,” whispered Sybil conspiratorially.

“Petite pois with champignons” said Tim.

Dobbs dropped his pencil.

Another crash came from the kitchen. “No problem. That one was cracked already,” said Horse.

Dobbs retreated with the solemnity of a diplomat withdrawing from failed peace talks.

Tim and Sybil lasted four seconds before laughing.

“There goes our respectable evening,” said Tim.

“Respectable evenings are over-valued.”

“I was hoping not to be observed by parishioners.”

“You were hoping to impress me.”

Silence settled again, gentler this time.

Sybil glanced at his hand. “Can I ask? You still wear your ring.”

Tim looked down. His thumb moved to the gold band before he could stop it.

“Yes.”

“Sarah?”

He nodded.

“I liked her. She was good people.”

“Thank you,” said Tim. “She was amazing. She even got on with my mother.”

“Five years?”

“Five years last March.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

There was no fuss in her voice. No sentimental upholstery. Just room.

“I didn’t take it off,” he said, still rotating the ring between his thumb and forefinger. “At first because I couldn’t. Then because I didn’t want to. Then because I wasn’t sure what it would mean if I did.”

“And now?”

“I still don’t know.”

Sybil nodded. “That’s honest.”

“It feels cowardly.”

“Not everything unresolved is cowardice, Tim.”

He looked at her. She had used his name. Not Vicar. Tim.

“That may be the kindest thing anyone has said to me.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

He laughed softly.

“What about you?” he asked.

“What about me?”

“You said the sermon reminded you of Greenham.”

Her face shifted. Not closed, exactly. Fortified.

“I gave years to that life. Greenham. CND. Marches. Draughty halls. Leaflets smelling of hot dust and the collapse of civilisation. By the Millennium, we honestly thought history had turned. Berlin Wall down. Soviet Union gone. The world might actually become sane.”

“And now?”

“Now we have better phones and worse imaginations.”

Tim said nothing. A half smile. A shared sense of knowing.

“I’m angrier about it than I expected,” said Sybil. “Not because I regret it. Because we were young enough to believe effort had consequences. Sometimes I feel we pushed a boulder uphill, and the boulder acquired sponsorship.”

Tim smiled sadly. “The church has a similar arrangement.”

“With boulders?”

“With hope.”

Horse’s head reappeared through the kitchen door. “Dobbs wants to know if cold soup needs warming up.”

“No,” said Sybil and Tim together.

Horse nodded. “Thought not. Seemed wrong.”

The door swung shut.

Tim folded his hands.

“When Sarah died,” he said, “people told me time would heal. It didn’t, though. It rearranged the furniture. I stopped walking into grief at every door, but it was still in the house.”

Sybil’s eyes softened.

“I know that kind of house.”

“I think,” he said, “that seeing you has opened a door I thought had been sealed.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He looked surprised.

“Dangerous isn’t always bad,” said Sybil. “Cruise missiles are bad dangerous. First dates are ridiculous dangerous. Different category.”

Tim smiled.

Dobbs returned with two bowls.

“Vicar’s oysters,” he announced.

“It’s vichyssoise,” said Sybil.

“That remains a matter of debate,” said Dobbs.

He placed soup before her and a pile of bread under Tim’s chin.

“Your brush shelter.”

“Thank you, Dobbs.”

Dobbs lowered his voice. “Horse and I are entirely discreet.”

At that moment, from the kitchen, Horse shouted, “Ask him if he’s kissed her yet.”

Dobbs closed his eyes.

Gregory appeared behind him, trembling managerially.

“Mr Dobbs. Kitchen. Now. Mr Palmer is drying cutlery with what may be a napkin or one of my cravats.”

Dobbs gave a little stiff bow and withdrew.

Gregory turned to Tim and Sybil. “New staff. Enthusiasm is not the same as training, but unfortunately it is cheaper.” By something approaching telepathy, Tim and Sybil decided not to wreck his evening entirely by informing Gregory that his new staff were a one-night-only performance.

When he had gone, Sybil lifted her spoon.

“Well,” she said. “Shall we call this a first date?”

Tim went still.

“I wasn’t sure we were allowed.”

“Who by?”

“Grief. History. The parish. God. My own alarming capacity for awkwardness.”

“God can cope. The parish will have to. History is busy repeating itself elsewhere. And grief...” She paused. “Grief may have to sit with us. But it doesn’t get to order for the table.”

Tim breathed out.

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

Sybil reached across and placed her hand over his. Not dramatically. Not permanently. Just enough.

“Then yes,” she said. “A first date.”

The kitchen went silent, which meant Dobbs and Horse were listening so hard they had neglected to destroy any more crockery.

Tim looked at Sybil’s hand on his, then at her face.

“Would you consider a second?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“But somewhere else. Not Havnot.”

“Agreed.”

“And somewhere without staff recruited from the parish surveillance network.”

“I’ll make enquiries in Portsmouth.”

“Make them discreetly.”

Tim smiled; for once, it looked like hope was taking off its coat.

Behind the kitchen door came a whisper.

“Portsmouth,” said Dobbs.

“Long way,” said Horse.

“Worth the petrol?”

“Depends if there’s pudding.”

Sybil squeezed Tim’s hand once, then released it.

“Next time,” she said, “we order in English.”

“Probably wise.”

“And if you hover—”

“I know.”

“No,” said Sybil. “This time I might let you.”

Tim stared at her.

From the kitchen came the sound of Horse dropping something metallic and unnecessary.

Gregory’s voice rose in anguish from deep within the bowels of the old building.

“Mr Palmer! That was Georgian!”

Sybil smiled.

The Dolphin, after two centuries of decline, had finally witnessed something almost graceful.

________________________________________

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online. For books, merch and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates) see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe for more details.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

Sybil Ratchett had not intended to go to church.

She had intended to sort winter coats, re-price the chipped Portmeirion, and write a notice explaining that the charity shop could not accept duvets, broken microwaves, half-used paint, or exercise equipment purchased during a brief moral crisis in January.

But on Saturday evening, while washing a Keep Calm and Carry On mug (a phrase Sybil considered responsible for much of Britain’s emotional constipation) she realised she was thinking about Tim Keen again.

This was irritating.

Sybil had no objection to men in theory. But romance, like fondue, was a thing people spoke of fondly while forgetting the mess, the smell, and the cheese-based entrapment.

And yet there he was: the vicar with the kind eyes, the courage-avoidance vocabulary, and the face of a man who could lead the town in silence but not survive being handed a crocheted square.

So, purely as an experiment, Sybil decided to go to St Faithful’s on Sunday.

Not because of Tim.

Obviously not because of Tim.

Because she was curious. Curiosity had scientific dignity. Curiosity did not require one to admit that sitting in the same room as a particular clergyman had caused one to change earrings twice.

She arrived early, because arriving late meant being looked at, and Sybil had done enough being looked at by policemen, journalists, security guards, bishops and developers.

Church, she reminded herself, was part of the Establishment. Greenham had taught her how to sleep badly in a ‘bender’, sing when frightened, go heavy when bailiffs got earnest about removing her, share soup with women who disagreed about everything except cruise missiles. As far as the Church of England was concerned, Greenham had taught her to distrust polite institutions when they blessed violent things. The camp closed in September 2000, but suspicion had never left her.

And churches were tidy power with flowers.

Except St Faithful’s, she discovered, was not especially tidy.

Lionel Hargreaves was at the organ, rehearsing the choir with the expression of a man watching Mozart lowered into a municipal shredder.

“No, no, no,” he said. “Mozart wrote notes. He did not scatter suggestions across the page and hope for creative interpretation.”

A tenor muttered that it was too early.

“It was also early in Salzburg,” said Lionel. “They managed.”

Near the vestry, Mrs Pauline Rivers had intercepted a small, trembling server in trainers.

“Absolutely not,” she said, in the tone of a woman defending Chalcedonian orthodoxy. “The sanctuary is not a skate park. I have black shoes.”

“They’re size four,” she added. “Stuff the toes with tissues. That is what tissues are for.” Sybil wondered how the church ever expected to nurture young faith.

Alan Dobbs, in his verger’s black, moved through the nave like a border collie in a sheep-dog trial, checking the location of hassocks and hymn books, and speaking firmly to the radiators. He seemed especially concerned about the service sheets.

“Upside down last week,” he muttered. “Can’t have that. People will think Lent’s started again.”

Outside, through the porch door, Sybil heard Kevin calling out into the morning air.

“Horse. Come inside.”

“Not before I have to,” said Horse, somewhere in the churchyard.

“It’s church. Indoors is the main bit. It’s where the people are.”

“Dead people are less trouble.”

“Horse.”

“I’m coming.”

“You said that five minutes ago.”

“I was nearly coming.”

Sybil sat in pew four, which seemed safely neither eager nor aloof. She was deciding St Faithful’s was less a building than a supervised accident when Tim came in.

He saw her.

For one second his face opened. Then it panicked and shut again.

Sybil looked down at her service sheet. One should not stare directly at a man discovering an interior landslide.

Tim retreated to the vestry at speed, and put one hand on the table.

Sandy Lintel noticed.

“Tim?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve gone the colour of unbuttered toast.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re holding the lavabo towel like a distress flag.”

Tim looked down.

“I may need a moment.”

Sandy closed the door and put a steadying hand under his elbow, which was not the first time a curate had held up a vicar, but considering her surname, this was perhaps the most literal.

“Breathe,” she said. “In. Out. Again.”

Tim obeyed, badly.

“What’s happened?”

“She’s here.”

“Who?”

“Sybil.”

Sandy’s face softened. “Ah.”

“It’s absurd.”

“Feelings often are. That’s why we British don’t let them out, as a rule.”

“I haven’t felt anything like this since Sarah died.”

Sandy said nothing. Wisely.

“It’s been five years,” said Tim. “I thought that part of me had become... retired. Like the old photocopier.”

“And now?”

“It has come back like a train through the vestry wall.”

“That sounds inconvenient.”

“She’ll be listening. To everything. Whether I say ‘almighty’ with sufficient theological seriousness.”

“She runs a charity shop, Tim, not MI5.”

“You haven’t seen her reject a breadmaker.”

Sandy smiled. “I’ll stay close. Deacon beside you. If you wobble, I’ll look holy and pass you something holy.”

“That may be the most Anglican sentence ever spoken.”

The service began.

Tim did not collapse. This was noted by no one except Sandy, who looked ready to catch either a Gospel book or a vicar.

Sybil watched him. Not sentimentally. She had no intention of gazing at clergy in any manner that might suggest she was interested in them. But she watched.

He was different at the altar. Still himself, but gathered. The flustered man from the charity shop had not vanished; he had been taken into something larger. His hands steadied. His voice found the room. His eyes lifted as if he trusted silence to hold.

The sermon was called, rather alarmingly, “Who Would Jesus Bomb?”

Sybil sat up.

Tim spoke about the ease with which Christians blessed violence once it wore the right flag, quoted the right verse, or promised to protect the right people from the wrong ones. He spoke about Jesus refusing domination. He spoke about peace not as niceness, but as costly resistance. He did not make it tidy. He did not make it beige.

Sybil felt something old and stubborn in her stand to attention. She was not so caught up, however, as to fail to notice Perry Wainwright turning a shade of apoplectic purple across the aisle.

Afterwards, over coffee, Tim was attempting to look normal beside a plate of custard creams. He was failing with distinction.

Sybil approached.

“Vicar.”

“Sybil.”

“I enjoyed your sermon.”

“Thank you.”

“‘Who would Jesus bomb?’ is not the sort of question I expected before coffee.”

“No. I suppose not.”

“It reminded me of Greenham.”

Tim looked at her properly then.

“Did it?”

“The better parts. Not the mud. Or the toilets. Or the man from the Daily Mail who asked whether we were all just angry because our husbands didn’t understand us.”

“What did you say?”

“That nuclear annihilation seemed a touch excessive.”

Tim laughed. Properly this time.

Sybil smiled.

“I’d be interested to hear more,” she said, “about your views on Christian pacifism.”

Tim’s brain briefly left the parish.

“Yes,” he said. “I have views.”

“So I gathered.”

“I mean, I’d be happy to talk. Sometime. In a non-pulpit setting.”

“The Dolphin does dinner on Mondays.”

“It does.”

“Monday, then?”

Tim blinked.

“With me?”

“No,” said Sybil. “With that plate of biscuits. Of course with you.”

“Yes,” said Tim. “Monday. Dinner. The Dolphin. Excellent. Excellent.”

From across the church, Barbara Keen saw everything.

She said nothing.

This cost her dearly.

Sybil took a custard cream.

“Try not to hover when you arrive,” she said.

Then she walked away, leaving Tim beside the coffee urn, smiling like a man who had survived judgement and been sentenced to hope.

What happened at The Dolphin, however, is another matter.

And The Faithful will need to be patient.

________________________________________

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online. For books, merch and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates) see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe for more details.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

At four o’clock, Barbara inspected the Victoria sponge as though it were a peace treaty.

“Is there enough?” asked Harold. “For Horse?”

Tim inhaled. “Horace.”

“Yes,” said Harold. “Horace. Obviously.”

The doorbell rang. Tim opened the door. Kevin stood on the step looking as if every muscle had been briefed by anxiety. Beside him, Horse held something large wrapped in newspaper.

“Afternoon,” said Horse. “I’ve brought rhubarb.”

Kevin closed his eyes. “I told him not to. But he insisted.”

“Everyone likes rhubarb,” explained Horse, as if this explained all his life decisions.

Inside, Barbara rose too quickly.

“Hello, Mum,” said Kevin.

“Hello, Kevin.”

Their embrace had all the natural grace of two people trying to pass on a narrow pavement while carrying trays: one cheek, half another cheek, Barbara’s glasses, Kevin’s shoulder, and a small sound like love trying to get through.

Harold then offered Kevin his hand. It was a handshake, but also a barricade, and possibly a small surrender.

“Good to see you,” said Harold.

“Is it?” said Kevin.

“Yes,” said Harold, then panicked. “You look thinner.”

Horse lifted the rhubarb. “He eats properly.”

Harold turned. “Ah. Pony.”

The room froze. Tim contemplated emigration. Horse looked down at himself, then back at Harold.

“Pony?”

“I meant—”

“Horse,” said Barbara, with lethal clarity.

“Yes. Horse. Obviously.”

“Well,” said Horse, “I have been called worse.”

Harold swallowed. “I apologise.”

“Accepted,” said Horse. “Though, for accuracy, I’m more of a shire horse.”

Kevin laughed despite himself, and the room breathed again.

Tea began cautiously. Kevin sat on the edge of the sofa as though awaiting a medical diagnosis. Harold attempted a conversation about the choir, failed, and retreated into embarrassed silence.

Barbara poured tea. Glancing at Kevin she said, “Still no sugar?”

“You remembered,” said Kevin, with some surprise. Horse accepted three sugars because he was “cutting down”.

The Victoria sponge arrived, eloquent in its role as a purveyor of diplomacy. Horse received a piece large enough to satisfy ordinary hospitality but small enough to cause him private concern, shown only by the lift of an eyebrow.

“There is more,” said Barbara.

“It’s peace cake,” said Horse. “At least there should be enough of it.”

Barbara looked at him sharply, then cut him another slice. In family diplomacy an extra sliver of sponge can be a treaty. Horse held the bone china plate like a man examining an unexploded bomb.

Kevin put down his cup. “I wasn’t sure I should come. I wasn’t sure if this was a one-off. A guilt tea. A vicar-arranged moral ambush.”

Barbara looked at her son. “It isn’t a one-off. We won’t become a perfect family by teatime. But we would like to try.”

Kevin’s face tightened. “I tried before.”

“I know,” said Barbara. “And I am sorry.”

The silence that followed was not comfortable, but it was no longer empty. It had people in it.

Then Horse looked through the window. “Your hydrangea’s in trouble,” he commented.

Barbara blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“That one. Looks sulky.”

“It is not sulky. It is recovering.”

“From what?”

“Travel. I brought it from Newton Abbot. With the peony, two hostas, rosemary, and some snowdrops in the green.”

Horse stood.

“What are you doing?” asked Kevin.

“Plants don’t know we’re having tea.”

Five minutes later they were all in the garden, where Horse examined Barbara’s pots with tender brutality.

“This one’s dry,” he commented.

“It’s had water,” said Barbara.

“When?”

“Tuesday. It rained.”

“Not in the pot, it didn’t.”

Barbara received this as insight from a minor prophet. Horse lifted the peony.

“Good roots. Wants deeper soil. Too much shade here. Over by that wall. Morning sun. Bit of shelter.”

Barbara stared. “I wondered about that.”

“You were right.”

No one could have predicted the power of those three words. Barbara stood a little taller.

Within a few minutes, having rescued a rusty spade from Tim’s poor excuse for a shed, Horse was digging. Barbara was directing. Kevin watched, astonished at Horse’s compliance with Barbara’s instructions.

“Mum, I’ve never seen anyone take gardening instructions from you without losing the will to live,” he said.

Horse looked up. “I used to help my Auntie Lakshmi. She once made a man cry at the village show.”

Barbara nodded. “Then you have been properly trained.”

That was the moment, Tim later thought, when Barbara Keen fell in love with Horace Palmer. Not romantically, of course. But here was a man who knew hydrangeas sulked, hostas needed defending, and compost was not optional.

Harold stood beside Kevin. “He’s very capable.”

“Yes.”

“With plants. And cake, in fact.”

Kevin almost smiled. “Yes.”

Watching Horse firm soil round the peony, Harold said quietly, “I have made rather a mess of things. I thought I was being principled. Mostly, I think, I was proud.”

“That’s quite a lot for one sentence,” said Kevin.

“I have been preparing it.”

Harold took a breath.

“I’m sorry, Kevin.”

It was not eloquent. It was just three words from an old man who had spent years mistaking prejudice for principle, and had finally noticed the difference.

“All right,” said Kevin.

“No,” said Harold. “But I would like it to become all right.”

Kevin nodded. “It can begin.”

Harold extended his hand. Kevin took it. This time Harold’s other hand briefly covered Kevin’s.

Then, startled by his own tenderness, Harold said, “Does Horace know anything about gutters?”

“Dad.”

Horse called across the garden, “I can look at gutters.”

“No,” said Kevin. “We are not here to fix gutters.”

“That’s how it starts,” said Tim.

“What?” asked Kevin.

“Reconciliation. Quickly followed by a family work-rota.”

Back inside, Harold passed the cake plate.

“More sponge, Horace?”

The room paused, because the name was right.

“Thank you, Mr Keen,” said Horse.

“Harold, please.”

“Oh, OK. I thought we were being formal. Just call me Horse. Everyone does.”

Some time later, at the door, Barbara embraced Kevin again. This time it was easier.

“I shall telephone,” she said. “Perhaps once a week.”

“That would be nice.”

Harold put a hand on Kevin’s shoulder.

“Come again.”

“We will,” said Kevin.

“Will there be cake?” enquired Horse.

“Always,” said Barbara.

Horse followed Kevin down the path, then turned back.

“I’ll bring secateurs next time.”

Kevin said something probably unprintable in a parish publication.

Barbara watched. “He looks well,” she said.

“Yes,” said Tim.

“And Horse is very practical.”

“Yes.”

“And large.”

“Yes.”

“But practical.”

Harold looked at the window. “Do you suppose he really can do gutters?”

Barbara turned. “Harold, if you make reconciliation with our son dependent on free guttering, I shall bury you under the hydrangea.”

Harold considered this. “It is better placed now.”

And Tim thought that perhaps the kingdom of God sometimes arrived not with trumpets or certainty, but with Victoria sponge, muddy trousers, bad apologies, and a large man who knew where to plant a peony.

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online. For books, merch and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates) see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe for more details.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

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It was the Thursday before polling day, and The Little John had acquired that particular English atmosphere which descends whenever democracy is nearby: civic duty, mild suspicion, and several people who had suddenly remembered they were “passionate about local issues”, having spent the previous four years ignoring parish council minutes as if they were written in Aramaic.

Clarence had already refused three election posters.

“I am politically neutral,” he announced, polishing a glass.

“You’ve got a framed photograph of Margaret Thatcher over the darts trophy,” said Sandy.

“That is not political,” said Clarence. “That is historical.”

“It’s above the fruit machine.”

“Exactly. She keeps an eye on the economy.”

Around the corner table sat Dobbs, Perry Wainwright, Lionel Hargreaves, Leslie Griffin, Judith Crowther, Malcolm Bowyer and, arriving late with crisps, Horse Palmer.

“I simply think,” said Dobbs, “that people have had enough.”

This was Dobbs’s usual opening move in any political discussion. It applied equally to immigration, potholes, bishops, self-service checkouts, modern hymnody and the price of sausages.

“Enough of what?” asked Sandy.

Dobbs frowned. “Everything. Bins. Parking. Council tax. People coming over here. People not going over there. That new pedestrian crossing which beeps like a microwave in distress.”

“So what do you want from local government?” asked Tim, who had just arrived and was removing his coat.

Dobbs brightened. “Proper services.”

“Such as?”

“Bins emptied. Streetlights working. Police about. Public loos open. Grass cut. Library kept. And no more potholes to swallow Deliveroo riders.”

“And would you pay more council tax for that?”

Dobbs looked offended. “Certainly not.”

“Right,” said Tim. “A miracle, then.”

Perry cleared his throat. “The real issue is waste. Public money must be spent wisely.”

“Excellent,” said Judith. “Then perhaps you would care to explain the St Faithful’s ceremonial bunting fund.”

Perry became very still.

“That,” he said, “is different.”

“How?”

“It lifts morale.”

“It lives in three plastic crates marked ‘miscellaneous’ and smells of damp Jubilee.”

“Precisely,” said Perry. “Heritage.”

“Everyone believes in cutting waste,” said Sandy, “until waste turns out to be something they personally like.”

“I am wholly in favour of economy,” said Lionel, “provided it does not affect church music, arts funding, organ maintenance, choral scholarships, piano tuning, or anything composed before 1937.”

“Very public-spirited,” said Clarence.

“I do not require mockery from a man who thinks crisps are a food group.”

Malcolm Bowyer leaned forward. “Housebuilding. That’s the issue. Build, build, build, they say. Affordable homes. Local growth. Community infrastructure. Very fine words until somebody wants to put thirty-two houses behind your business.”

“People do need somewhere to live,” said Sandy.

“I agree,” said Malcolm. “Deeply. Nurses. Teachers. Young families. Essential workers. All very deserving.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The access road would go through the overflow parking behind Bowyer’s.”

“There it is,” said Tim.

“And the barbecue area,” said Malcolm darkly.

There was a horrified silence.

“The Jubilee barbecue area?” asked Perry.

“The same.”

“The one we used in 1977 and almost used again in 2012?”

Dobbs shook his head. “You can’t build on history.”

“It’s a square of tarmac and two traffic cones,” said Judith.

“It is community memory,” said Perry.

Horse opened his crisps. “I thought community memory was when nobody can remember who borrowed the extension lead.”

Leslie, who had been waiting for a suitable moment and had failed to recognise several, opened a folder.

“What we need,” he said, “is Proper Process – a costed local plan, informed by community consultation, environmental analysis, long-term funding arrangements and proportional representation.”

“Ah!” said Judith. “Proper Process — the thing demanded by people who have confused being consulted with being obeyed.”

Sandy raised her glass. “Now that should be printed on every parish noticeboard in the land.”

Clarence looked alarmed. “Is this ‘Proper Process’ going to involve a meeting in my function room?”

“Possibly.”

“Then democracy can happen elsewhere. Seventeen people buying five limes and sodas between them in three hours? Not happening here.”

Sandy turned to Clarence. “And what do you want from the council?”

“Support for local businesses,” said Clarence at once. “Lower rates, easier licensing, more free parking, fewer regulations, better street cleaning, more frequent grass cutting, less paperwork, and perhaps a grant for traditional community hospitality.”

“You mean the pub?”

“I mean the historic social infrastructure of Havnot.”

“You mean the pub.”

“Yes.”

“And would you pay more tax for all that?”

Clarence recoiled. “I run a business, Sandy. I cannot be expected to fund civilisation single-handed.”

“No,” said Judith. “Apparently nobody can.”

There was a brief silence, during which everyone contemplated the terrible unfairness of being asked to pay for things they definitely wanted.

Tim raised a hand. “Perhaps local elections are useful precisely because they expose us.”

“In what way?” asked Malcolm.

“At national level,” said Tim, “we can say enormous things. We can talk about growth, fairness, freedom, security, tradition, change, borders, climate, prosperity. Big words. Noble words. Pub words. But local elections ask smaller, ruder questions. Who empties the bins? Who pays for the loos? Where do the houses go? Which road gets fixed first? How much should parking cost? Do we want a library enough to fund it, or only enough to complain when it closes?”

“That would make a terrible leaflet,” said Clarence.

“Yes,” said Tim. “Far too honest.”

Dobbs looked into his beer. “I just don’t like paying more and getting less.”

“No-one does,” said Sandy. “But we also don’t like paying less and discovering that less is precisely what we bought.”

Judith nodded. “That is the bit most manifestos leave out.”

And for a few minutes, in The Little John, Havnot achieved something close to political consensus: everyone wanted better services, nobody wanted higher taxes, and whatever happened on polling day, somebody would still have to collect the bins on Thursday.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at [https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun](https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun)

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online. For books, merch and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates) see [https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe](https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe) for more details.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

Barbara Keen had always believed in sensible decluttering, by which she meant other people getting rid of things they had foolishly accumulated, while she retained essential items such as spare net curtains, fourteen egg cups, her collection of ceramic hedgehogs and a fondue set last used during the Callaghan administration.

This was why Tim found himself, on a damp Thursday morning, carrying three cardboard boxes across Havnot High Street towards St Faithful’s Charity Shop.

“Careful with that one,” said Barbara.

“Mother, this box contains seven mugs, a chipped gravy boat, and something I’m fairly sure is a wooden duck.”

“It belonged to your Auntie Jean,” said Barbara. “It has sentimental value,” she added.

“Then why are we giving it away?”

Barbara did not answer this. Certain questions were best treated as environmental noise.

The shop door gave its familiar little 'ting' as Barbara entered. Tim followed, slightly sideways, because one box had begun to sag in a depressed manner.

The shop was busy. St Faithful’s Charity Shop was never merely a shop. It was part retail outlet, part confessional, and part municipal recycling centre for people who had decided that charity was more convenient than booking a timed slot at the tip.

A woman near the counter was attempting to donate a breadmaker with no paddle, two cracked plant pots, and an electrical item so mysterious that even the plug looked embarrassed. At the far end, Mrs Larch from Albion Road had trapped a volunteer beside the greetings cards and was explaining the history of her brother-in-law’s conservatory.

And behind the counter stood Sybil Rachett. The title 'Charity Shop Manager' didn't really do her justice. She should really be described by the sort of honorific assigned to royalty, or supreme leaders.

Tim stopped.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone else would have noticed. But something inside him, some quiet administrative office of the soul, put down its pen and stared.

Sybil wore a green jumper, practical boots, and an expression which suggested that she had once faced down military police and was therefore unlikely to be defeated by a breadmaker.

“Good morning, Barbara,” she said.

“Good morning, Sybil. I’ve brought a few things.”

Sybil looked at the boxes.

“That’s what they all say.”

Barbara laughed.

Tim did not. Tim was still by the door, holding his cardboard box, looking as though he had wandered into one of the more complicated parables.

Sybil turned her eyes to him.

“Good morning, Vicar,” she called cheerfully enough.

“Good morning,” said Tim, and immediately forgot all other available words in the English language.

Barbara saw it.

Barbara Keen had raised twin boys. She had sat through school concerts, university crises, theological enthusiasms, and Harold’s campaign against spreadable butter. She knew a male Keen in difficulty when she saw one.

Which was, at that moment, the precise state of Tim.

Not because anything had happened. That was the problem. Nothing had happened. Sybil had merely looked at him and said “Good morning, Vicar,” and Tim had become a man attempting to preach on the Beatitudes while trapped inside a wardrobe.

“Timothy,” said Barbara. “Put the box down.”

“Yes,” said Tim. “The box.”

He placed it on the counter with excessive care, as though it contained relics.

Sybil opened the first flap.

“Mugs,” she said.

“Good mugs,” said Barbara.

“One cracked. One with ‘World’s Best Grandad’ on it. One from Crete.”

“That one’s hardly been used.”

“That may not be the selling point you think it is.”

Tim gave a small laugh. It came out too loudly, bounced off a shelf of chinaware, and died in the children’s books.

Sybil glanced at him. Sideways.

He looked at a shelf of paperbacks with the intensity of a man seeking asylum among Catherine Cookson.

The woman with the breadmaker approached.

“I wondered whether you might take this. It works perfectly well except for the paddle thing, which I expect someone clever could find online.”

Sybil smiled.

It was a kind smile. It was also a smile with steel in the hinges.

“I’m afraid we can’t sell incomplete electrical items.”

“Oh. But it seems such a shame to throw it away.”

“It does,” said Sybil. “That’s why the council recycling centre exists.”

“I thought charity shops liked things.”

“We have a distinct preference for things people can use.”

There was a short silence, during which the breadmaker appeared to lose the argument.

“Would you take the plant pots?”

Sybil looked at them.

“No. Sorry.”

“They’re only cracked on one side.”

“So is Western civilisation, but we’re not putting a price sticker on it.”

The woman blinked. Barbara made a tiny noise of delight. Tim stared at Sybil as though she had just recited the Magnificat in fluent common sense.

The woman gathered up the breadmaker and departed, wounded but redirected. Sybil swept from the counter, to rescue her volunteer from Mrs Larch, who had reached year fourteen of her brother-in-law's conservatory saga.

“That,” whispered Tim, “was extraordinary.”

Barbara looked at him.

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“It was a woman saying no to a broken breadmaker.”

“With compassion. But clarity.”

“Oh dear,” said Barbara.

“What?”

“She’s remarkable,” he said.

Barbara’s eyes brightened with a terrible maternal light.

“Is she?”

“She doesn’t embarrass people. She doesn’t let them take over either. She just… draws a boundary.”

“Boundaries are very important,” said Barbara.

“Yes.”

“Especially in the romance department.”

Tim turned sharply.

“Mother.”

“What?”

“There is no romance department.”

“That is precisely the problem.”

Tim picked up a brass candlestick and examined it, despite having no idea whether it had come from their box or already belonged to the shop.

Barbara lowered her voice.

“This is why you are still single after all these years.”

“Because I believe in boundaries?”

“Because you are a total coward in the romance department.”

“I am not a coward.”

“Timothy, you once preached to six hundred people in the pouring rain on Remembrance Sunday while the mayor’s microphone failed and a bugler fainted.”

“Yes.”

“You were magnificent.”

“That’s very kind.”

“And yet that woman says ‘good morning’ to you and you behave as if someone has asked you to explain TikTok to the Diocesan Synod.”

“I am simply being respectful.”

“You are stunned. Rabbit. Headlights.”

“I am not stunned.”

“You’re holding a fondue fork.”

Tim looked down. He was indeed holding a fondue fork.

“That is neither here nor there.”

“It is very much here,” said Barbara, “and so are you, unfortunately.”

Across the shop, Sybil was sorting donations: a nearly new winter coat to the rail, three thrillers to the book pile, a stained cushion cover to textile recycling.

Then she looked up.

Tim started away so quickly that he apologised to a lampshade.

Sybil smiled to herself.

She had known for some time, of course.

Tim Keen was not difficult to read in the charity shop. In the pulpit, he had command. At civic services, he carried himself with that odd mixture of gravity and gentleness which made people trust him even when they suspected church was not really their thing. At Remembrance, he could stand before veterans, councillors, schoolchildren, police officers, the British Legion, a brass band, and half the town of Havnot, and somehow make silence feel like a shared act rather than an awkward pause.

But in the shop, with Sybil, he became something else entirely.

A scolded puppy, perhaps.

No, not quite. Puppies had more confidence.

A love-struck teenager who had accidentally been ordained.

Sybil did not dislike this. She would not have admitted that she liked it, not even to herself. But a woman could be independent, competent, politically alert, suspicious of nonsense, and still not be entirely displeased to discover that a good man had become quietly ridiculous in her presence.

The trick was not to encourage him too much.

Men, in Sybil’s experience, could mistake encouragement for permission, permission for entitlement, and entitlement for a domestic arrangement involving someone else remembering where their socks lived. She had marched at Greenham, sung against nuclear weapons in cold fields, marched to Just Stop Oil, argued with councillors, developers, vicars and headteachers, and once dismantled a patronising man from the water board who made the mistake of calling her “dear”.

She had no intention of being acquired in later life like a pleasant side table.

Still, Tim was interesting.

Not because he was the vicar. Sybil had known vicars before. Some were lovely. Some were vain. Some were so desperate to be relevant that normal conversation felt like a youth-work initiative. Tim, at least, seemed to know that the world was broken without imagining that he had been personally appointed to mend it by Tuesday.

And he listened. That was rarer.

When Sybil had once mentioned Greenham Common, he had not become romantically misty-eyed about protest, nor made a nervous joke about women with bolt-cutters. He had asked what had kept her there when it was cold.

A good question. Not a clever one. A good one.

She had told him: “Rage, mostly. Then friendship. Then hope. In that order.”

He had been quiet for a long time after that.

Now he was standing beside his mother, holding a fondue fork like a man unsure whether it was symbolic.

Sybil decided to help him suffer.

“Vicar,” she called.

Tim turned.

“Yes?”

“Could you give me a hand with this box?”

“Of course.”

He crossed the shop too quickly, then slowed halfway, as if concerned that eagerness might be revealing.

Barbara watched from beside the jigsaws, radiant.

The box was full of books. Heavy books. The kind people donate after deciding that owning a complete set of encyclopaedias is not the same as having used them.

“If you could put those by the back door,” said Sybil. “They’ll need recycling.”

Tim was shocked. "All that knowledge. Just recycled?"

"Knowledge is wonderful," agreed Sybil. "But not when it’s thirty years out of date and still thinks Yugoslavia is an excellent holiday destination."

Tim nodded. He conceded that she had made an excellent point. What a magnificent woman, he thought.

Tim lifted the box. It was heavier than expected, and for one dreadful second his face suggested martyrdom.

“Are you all right?” said Sybil.

“Perfectly.”

“You don’t have to prove anything.”

“I wasn’t.”

“No,” she said. “Men rarely are when they’re proving things.”

Tim nearly smiled, which was dangerous, because smiling made him look younger and kinder and less defended.

He carried the box to the back door and returned.

Sybil handed him another.

“This one’s lighter.”

“Thank you.”

“It contains scarves, a table runner, and something crocheted by a person with unresolved anger.”

Tim looked inside.

“Ah.”

“You see it?”

“I do.”

“That can go in textiles.”

“Yes.”

He stood there, waiting.

Sybil tilted her head. She was sizing him. In a manner not dissimilar to a cat considering whether the mouse deserved a sporting chance.

“You’re very good with the public, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“No. You probably wouldn’t.”

“I mean, one develops certain skills.”

“There it is.”

“What?”

“The vocabulary. 'One develops',” she mimicked.

Behind a nearby rail of coats, Barbara silently mouthed, “Vocabulary.”

Tim saw her and frowned.

Sybil saw him see her.

This improved the morning considerably.

“I only mean,” Sybil continued, “that you seem very composed in public. Remembrance. Christmas. Civic things. Funerals, too, I imagine.”

“One tries to be.”

“And yet in here you... hover.”

“I hover?”

“A little.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise. It’s not illegal. Not yet.”

“I wasn’t aware I was hovering.”

“You’re currently standing between ladies’ knitwear and miscellaneous ceramics holding a crocheted square. You have a certain ceremonial quality.”

Tim looked down.

The crocheted square hung from his hand like limp evidence.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see that.”

Barbara, who had moved closer under the pretence of inspecting sheet music, decided that Providence occasionally needed a nudge.

“Sybil,” she said, “Timothy was just saying how much he admires women with convictions.”

Tim closed his eyes.

The shop fell silent. Nobody entered. Dust motes hung motionless in the air. The whole of creation wanted to hear what happened next.

Sybil looked at Barbara. Then at Tim.

“Was he?”

Tim opened one eye, which was not, he felt, the most courageous beginning to any romance.

“I may have said something along those lines.”

“Women with convictions,” said Sybil, a little dangerously.

“In the sense of moral conviction,” said Tim quickly. “Not criminal.”

“That’s a pity. Criminal might have been more fun.”

Barbara beamed.

Tim made a small sound, somewhere between a laugh and a system failure.

“I meant,” he said, “that I admire people who act on what they believe.”

Sybil’s face changed then. Not much. But enough.

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Act on what you believe?”

The question was not sharp, exactly. But it was not soft either.

Tim looked at her. For a moment the shop seemed to rearrange itself around them: the smell of old books and furniture polish, the handwritten signs, the abandoned gravy boat, the crocheted square still dangling from Tim's fingers.

“I try,” he said.

Sybil waited.

Tim swallowed.

“And then, to be honest, I find several excellent reasons to be prudent.”

Sybil smiled.

There it was. Not the whole truth, perhaps, but a real piece of it.

“Prudence has its uses,” she said.

“So I tell myself.”

“And courage?”

“I preach about it.”

“That’s not quite the same thing.”

“No,” said Tim. “It isn’t.”

Barbara became very still. She had been hoping for flirtation, embarrassment, possibly a dinner invitation if the Holy Spirit was feeling unusually brisk. She had not expected theology with a pricing gun.

Sybil took the crocheted square from Tim’s hand and placed it in the textile bag.

“I don’t mind prudence,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t dress itself up as wisdom and expect applause.”

Tim looked at her.

“I may need to write that down.”

“No, Vicar. You may need to live with it for a bit.”

This was, Tim felt, both entirely fair and personally inconvenient.

Mrs Larch appeared beside them.

“Sybil, before I forget, I’ve brought in a few things from Derek’s shed. I know you said last time you couldn’t take paint, but these tins are hardly rusty.”

Sybil turned smoothly.

“Margaret, no paint.”

“But it’s very good paint.”

“No paint.”

“It’s magnolia.”

“Especially no magnolia.”

Tim laughed before he could stop himself.

Sybil glanced back.

“Something funny?”

“No. Yes. Sorry. Only, I’ve spent a good deal of parish ministry trying to say ‘especially no magnolia’ in different ways.”

“Then say it.”

“To whom?”

“To whoever keeps painting the world beige.”

Tim’s laughter faded into something warmer. He held her gaze for half a second longer than usual, which for Tim was practically a cavalry charge.

Barbara saw it.

Sybil saw Barbara seeing it.

Tim saw both of them seeing everything, and wished briefly that the floor would open, provided it did so in a pastorally sensitive way.

At last the donations were sorted. The gravy boat was rejected on the grounds that charity did not require the circulation of chipped ceramics. The wooden duck was accepted, though Sybil warned Barbara that it would be priced as rustic whimsy rather than sentimental heritage. The “World’s Best Grandad” mug was placed on the shelf, because Sybil said there was always a market for aspirational grandparenting.

Barbara picked up her handbag.

“Well,” she said, with the false innocence of a woman leaving a lit match near dry straw, “we mustn’t take up any more of your time.”

“You haven’t,” said Sybil.

Tim prepared to say goodbye in a manner that would be simple, dignified, and not remotely adolescent.

“See you,” he said.

This was, technically, a success.

Sybil looked at him.

“Goodbye, Vicar.”

Then, after the smallest pause, she added, “Try not to hover on the way out.”

Barbara made a noise that she converted, at great personal cost, into a cough.

Outside, the High Street carried on as if nothing significant had occurred. A bus visibly rusted at the stop. Someone from the council examined a bollard. A man in a waterproof jacket shouted into his phone about scaffolding. Ordinary life, thought Tim, had an offensively casual attitude towards moments of interior collapse.

Barbara took his arm.

“Well,” she said.

“Please don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You are about to.”

“I merely observe that she likes you.”

Tim stopped.

“Mother.”

“She does.”

“You cannot possibly know that.”

“I’m your mother. I know everything.”

“She was being kind.”

“No. She was playing with you.”

“That is not better.”

“It is much better. It means she’s interested enough to extend her claws.”

Tim looked back through the shop window. Sybil was at the counter now, pricing gun in hand, entirely herself. Competent. Amused. Untouchable. Or not untouchable, exactly. But certainly not to be approached by accident, vanity, or any man carrying unresolved emotional caution.

“She doesn’t need anyone,” he said quietly.

Barbara looked at him, and for once did not immediately pounce.

“No,” she said. “I don’t suppose she does.”

Tim nodded.

Then Barbara added, “That doesn’t mean she might not choose someone.”

He looked at her.

“Eventually.”

“Ah.”

“If he stops hovering.”

Tim sighed.

Barbara patted his arm.

“Come along, darling. Your father will want to know whether the gravy boat survived.”

“It didn’t.”

“No. I thought not. Unlike your father, Sybil has standards.”

They began walking back towards the rectory.

Behind them, in the charity shop window, Sybil glanced up just once and watched them go.

Then she smiled, printed a price label, and stuck it firmly onto the wooden duck.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online. For books, merch and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates) see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe for more details.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

Harold Keen had been in Havnot for eleven days when, over breakfast, he decided to mention that he had seen his other son.

This was not how Harold phrased it.

He was halfway through a slice of toast, and had just finished explaining to Tim why modern butter was too spreadable to be entirely trusted, when he lowered his knife, looked across the table, and said, with the solemnity of a man announcing troop movements, “I saw the Other One last night.”

Tim, who was trying to read an email from Judith Crowther about the urgent theological question of whether the parish hall dishwasher counted as “temperamental” or “demonically possessed,” looked up.

“The other one?” Tim had not noticed the capital letters.

“Your brother,” said Harold. “With his pony.”

Barbara Keen, who had been reading the Havnot Observer and quietly tutting at a planning application she did not understand, stiffened slightly.

Tim put down his phone.

“You mean Kevin and Horse.”

“I know what I mean,” said Harold.

“I’m not sure you do,” said Tim.

Barbara folded the newspaper with great care. Barbara folded newspapers as if preparing them for burial.

“Your father means,” she said, “that he saw Kevin at the choir.”

“And Horse,” said Tim.

“Yes,” said Barbara, in the tone of a woman conceding that gravity existed but refusing to approve of it.

There was a small silence.

From outside came the noise of a delivery van reversing somewhere in the lane, issuing its little electronic beep with the blind optimism of all modern machines.

Harold buttered his toast again, though it was already buttered.

“I must say,” he said, “I hadn’t expected to encounter him there.”

“At the Havnot Male Voice Choir?”

“Precisely. I thought he’d given up… well…” Harold waved the knife vaguely, as if Kevin’s entire life could be indicated with cutlery. “All that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?” asked Tim.

Harold looked irritated.

“You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” said Tim again, though in fact he did, and so did Barbara, and so, probably, did the toaster.

Barbara sighed.

“Timothy, please don’t be difficult at breakfast. It curdles the marmalade.”

Tim sat back in his chair.

“You haven’t spoken to Kevin since he moved in with Horse.”

Barbara’s face tightened.

“We have not wished to intrude.”

“That’s not true.”

“Timothy.”

“It isn’t. You haven’t wished to acknowledge it.”

Harold made a noise somewhere between a cough and a parliamentary objection.

“That is a very modern way of putting it.”

“It’s also the accurate way.”

Barbara looked back at her newspaper, although she had long since stopped reading it.

“We love Kevin,” she said quietly.

“I know you do.”

“We have always loved Kevin.”

“I know that too.”

“It is just…” She paused. “Difficult.”

“For whom?”

Barbara looked up.

“For us.”

And there it was, sitting between them beside the toast rack: the small, polished idol of family discomfort. Not hatred, not cruelty exactly, not anything as dramatic as that. Something softer, sadder, and more English. A silence maintained for years under the name of politeness. A wound kept clean by never looking at it.

Harold cleared his throat.

“In our day,” he said, “these things were not paraded about.”

“Kevin hasn’t paraded anything,” said Tim. “He’s lived quietly with someone who loves him, looks after him, argues with him, stops him doing foolish things, and occasionally sings next to him in a male voice choir. Which, frankly, is about as respectable as human existence gets.”

Barbara gave him a sharp look.

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not joking. Not entirely.”

Harold frowned.

“The man is called Horse.”

“That is not his baptismal name.”

“It’s not reassuring.”

“It’s Horace Palmer.”

“That is only slightly more reassuring.”

Despite herself, Barbara nearly smiled. Then she caught herself, because almost smiling at Horse was a slippery slope, and one never knew where that might end. Perhaps with being invited to supper. Perhaps with acceptance. Perhaps with casserole.

Tim softened his voice.

“Kevin is your son.”

Barbara said nothing.

Harold looked down at his plate.

“He was always the more awkward of you two.”

Tim blinked.

“Was he?”

“Yes,” said Harold. “You were difficult in an obvious way. Kevin was difficult privately. Much more alarming.”

“That may be because he knew he wasn’t safe to be obvious.”

Barbara flinched.

Tim regretted the sharpness as soon as he heard it, but did not take it back. Some truths needed to be spoken plainly, not because plainness healed everything, but because vagueness had done enough damage already.

Barbara’s hands were folded now in her lap.

“We never wanted him to feel unloved.”

“But did he?”

The question landed like a cup placed too firmly on a saucer.

Harold looked towards the window. Barbara looked at the table. Tim looked at both of them and felt, not for the first time, that being a vicar was sometimes easier than being a son. Congregations could be challenged from a pulpit. Parents had to be challenged across boiled eggs and toast soldiers.

Barbara said, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

She said it quietly, almost apologetically, as if she knew the phrase was too small for the size of the matter, but had found it in the cupboard of inherited certainties and did not know what else to use.

Tim closed his eyes briefly.

“Mother.”

“Well, that is what people say.”

“Yes. People also say ‘everything happens for a reason’ and ‘just be yourself’ and ‘I’m only playing devil’s advocate’ before ruining a perfectly decent lunch. Not every sentence improved by repetition is wise.”

Harold made the dangerous mistake of snorting.

Barbara turned on him.

“You have said it too.”

“I have said many things,” said Harold with dignity. “Not all of them have been considered doctrine.”

Tim reached for the coffee pot.

“Look,” he said. “There are Christians who read Scripture and come to the conclusion you came to. I know that. Some of them are sincere. Some of them are kind. Some of them are trying to be faithful, not cruel. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.”

Barbara watched him carefully.

“But?” she said.

“But,” said Tim, “there are also Christians who read Scripture and see something else. They see that the Bible speaks in particular times, cultures, assumptions, and social arrangements. They see that the passages often quoted at Kevin are not addressing faithful, loving, mutual partnerships between equals. They see that Jesus, when asked what mattered most, did not say, ‘Make sure you police the household arrangements of your adult children.’ He said ‘love God, and love your neighbour’.”

Harold looked unconvinced.

“That sounds rather convenient.”

“Yes,” said Tim. “Grace often does, to people who aren’t sure they want to offer it.”

Barbara breathed in sharply.

Tim held up a hand.

“I’m not saying there are no difficult questions. Of course there are difficult questions. There always are. The Church has spent two thousand years arguing about difficult questions, frequently while wearing extraordinary hats. But I am saying this: if your theology requires you to exile your own son from the warmth of your table, then something has gone badly wrong.”

Outside, the delivery van completed its manoeuvre with one last victorious beep.

No one spoke.

Then Harold said, “We did not exile him.”

“No,” said Tim. “You just let him understand where the border was.”

Barbara’s eyes had filled with tears, which annoyed her. Barbara did not approve of tears before ten in the morning. They suggested poor planning.

“You make us sound monstrous.”

“You’re not monstrous.”

“Well, thank you.”

“You’re frightened. And stubborn. And old-fashioned. And you have confused not knowing what to do with doing nothing.”

Harold looked at him.

“That is an unfairly accurate sentence.”

“It’s one of my gifts.”

Barbara dabbed her eye with the corner of a napkin.

“I don’t know how to talk to him now.”

“That’s all right,” said Tim. “You could begin with hello.”

Harold looked doubtful.

“After all this time?”

“Yes.”

“Just hello?”

“Possibly not ‘hello, the other one.’”

Barbara made a small sound. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob with better comic timing.

“And what,” she said, “are we supposed to say about Horse?”

“You could call him Horace.”

“I cannot call a grown man Horse.”

“He may prefer it.”

“I refuse to neigh at the breakfast table.”

“Good,” said Tim. “That feels like progress.”

Harold pushed away his plate.

“I do not dislike him.”

“No?”

“No. He seemed perfectly civil at choir.”

“He is perfectly civil.”

“A bit large.”

“That’s not a moral category.”

“And he sings bass.”

“That’s close, but still not a moral category.”

“He did know when to come in,” said Harold, grudgingly.

“That makes him a moral example to half the Church of England.”

Barbara looked at Tim with narrowed eyes.

“You are being flippant because you are worried.”

“Yes,” said Tim.

That surprised her.

Tim sighed. “Kevin is my brother. And I have watched him build a life without you in it because he believed that was less painful than asking you to love the whole of him. I should have challenged you sooner. I didn’t. Partly because I’m your son. Partly because I’m a coward. Partly because I’m Anglican, and we have mistaken avoidance for pastoral sensitivity for several generations now.”

Harold looked faintly offended on behalf of Anglicanism, a tradition to which he belonged principally through Christmas, funerals, and a strong feeling that the Book of Common Prayer had probably been better than whatever was happening now.

Barbara said, “Does Kevin hate us?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Has he said that?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Because he asks about you.”

That undid her.

Not dramatically. Barbara Keen did not collapse. She did not cry out. She simply lowered her head, and for a moment the brisk, guarded, competent woman disappeared, and Tim saw instead a mother who had lost years with her son and was only now allowing herself to know it.

Harold’s face changed too. His comic irritation slipped, and what remained was older, smaller, and more vulnerable.

“He asks about us?”

“Yes.”

“What does he ask?”

“Whether you are still calling Radio 4 the Home Programme. Whether Mum still recycles Christmas cards. Whether you’re eating properly. Whether the boiler’s behaving. Whether you need help with anything practical.”

Barbara gave a tiny laugh through tears.

“He always was good with boilers.”

“He is.”

Harold stared at the butter dish as if it contained a prophecy.

“And the other fellow?”

“Horse.”

“Yes. Him.”

“What about him?”

“Does he… look after him?”

Tim smiled.

“Yes. In their own way. Horse looks after Kevin by doing all the heavy lifting, fixing things, feeding him portions large enough for an agricultural contractor, and standing beside him with the quiet loyalty of a cathedral buttress. Kevin looks after Horse by stopping him saying the first six things that enter his head.”

Harold nodded slowly.

“That must be a full-time occupation.”

“It is certainly a vocation.”

Barbara reached for the napkin again.

“I don’t know what we believe about all this anymore.”

“That may be the most honest thing you’ve said.”

“It feels like betrayal.”

“Of what?”

“Of what we were taught.”

Tim leaned forward.

“Sometimes faithfulness means staying exactly where you were put. Sometimes it means following Christ into a bigger room than the one you inherited.”

Barbara looked at him.

“And you think Kevin is in that bigger room?”

“I think Kevin has been waiting in the doorway for years, wondering whether you were coming in.”

There was another silence.

Then, because human beings are strange and God is merciful, Barbara said, “And what about you?”

Tim stared at her.

“What about me?”

“Well,” she said carefully, “we are talking about relationships.”

“We were talking about Kevin.”

“Yes,” said Barbara. “But mothers are capable of holding more than one anxiety at once. We are like handbags in that respect.”

Harold looked up.

“I have never understood what is in your handbag.”

“And you never will,” said Barbara. “That is not the point.”

Tim rubbed his forehead.

“I am not discussing my private life over breakfast.”

“So there is a private life.”

“I did not say that.”

“You said you were not discussing it.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is exactly the same thing with a clerical collar on.”

Harold leaned back in his chair.

“Is there a woman?”

“No.”

Barbara tilted her head.

“No, there is not a woman, or no, you are not answering the question?”

“Yes.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the answer currently available.”

Barbara looked at him for a long moment, the way a customs officer looks at a suitcase that is ticking.

“Timothy,” she said at last, “you are blushing.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

“It is warm in here.”

“It is April.”

“The boiler is unpredictable.”

“Kevin would know how to fix that,” said Harold.

Tim stood, gathering plates with unnecessary haste.

“I am going to the church office.”

“Of course you are,” said Barbara.

“There is a dishwasher crisis.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“It may be demonic.”

Barbara watched him stack the plates with the air of a woman who had located a loose thread and was resisting the urge to pull.

“All right,” she said mildly. “We shall leave the matter for now.”

“For ever would also be acceptable.”

“No,” said Barbara. “For now.”

Harold looked between them.

“What have I missed?”

“Nothing,” said Tim.

“Something,” said Barbara.

Tim attempted escape towards the kitchen.

Harold followed him with his eyes.

“Do you have his number?”

Tim turned back.

“Kevin’s?”

“No, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. Yes, Kevin’s.”

Barbara looked frightened.

“Now?”

Harold lifted his chin.

“If one is going to make a fool of oneself, it is generally best to do it before lunch. Otherwise it ruins the afternoon.”

Tim took out his phone.

“I can call him.”

“No,” said Barbara quickly. “Not call. Not yet. I need… I need to know what to say.”

Tim thought for a moment.

“Start with: ‘We saw you at choir. We should have come over. We’re sorry we didn’t.’”

Barbara nodded slowly.

“And then?”

“‘Would you and Horse like to come for tea?’”

Harold looked alarmed.

“Tea?”

“Yes.”

“With cake?”

“I should think cake would help.”

“What sort of cake says ‘we have mishandled our son’s domestic life for several years but are trying to become better Christians’?”

“Fruit cake,” said Tim.

Barbara shook her head.

“Too judgemental.”

“Lemon drizzle?”

“Too frivolous.”

“Victoria sponge?”

Harold considered this.

“Neutral. Constitutional. Sound.”

Barbara nodded.

“Victoria sponge.”

Tim typed carefully, then paused.

“Are you sure?”

Barbara looked at Harold.

Harold looked at Barbara.

Then Harold said, “Add that the pony is welcome.”

“No,” said Barbara and Tim together.

Harold sighed.

“Very well. Add that Horace is welcome.”

Tim smiled.

He sent the message.

For a few seconds nothing happened.

Then the three of them sat staring at the phone with the intensity of disciples watching a tomb.

A reply appeared.

Tim read it.

“He says: ‘Thanks. We’d like that. Horse says he can bring a trestle table if required. Also he says Victoria sponge is acceptable, provided there is enough of it.’”

Barbara laughed.

It was not a polished laugh, or an elegant one. It came out cracked and startled, like something that had been shut in a cupboard and had finally found the handle.

Harold cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said. “That sounds manageable.”

Tim looked at his parents, at the toast crumbs, at the half-empty coffee pot, at the morning light falling across the table. It was not a miracle, not exactly. No angel had appeared. No doctrine had been settled. No years had been restored with one text message and a discussion about sponge cake.

But something had shifted.

A door, perhaps.

Not flung open. Not yet.

But unlatched.

Barbara picked up her newspaper again, then put it down.

“What time should we ask them?”

“Four?” said Tim.

“Four is good,” said Harold. “Civilised. Gives everyone time to retreat if necessary.”

Barbara reached for the butter.

“And Timothy?”

“Yes?”

“This private life you are not discussing.”

“No.”

Barbara smiled faintly.

“I shall leave it for now.”

“For ever would still be better.”

“No,” said Barbara. “Just for now.”

And for the first time since Harold and Barbara Keen had arrived in Havnot, breakfast ended not with someone retreating behind a newspaper, or behind sarcasm, or behind the exhausted dignity of family habit, but with the faint, improbable sense that grace had pulled up a chair, asked for coffee, and was prepared to stay for cake.

And possibly, though Tim would not yet have admitted this even under episcopal interrogation, with the terrifying possibility that his mother had noticed something he had barely dared to notice himself.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

Tim, who had been spreading marmalade on toast with the anxious care of a man aware that breakfast had become a committee meeting, looked up.

Barbara Keen, who was reading the previous day’s Havnot Observer because she considered the current day’s news “far too speculative,” lowered the paper.

“What sort of outside interests?” she asked.

Harold cleared his throat. He had been preparing the answer for some time.

“I was thinking,” he said, “of joining the male voice choir.”

There was a silence.

It was not a peaceful silence. It was a silence with scaffolding round it.

Tim blinked.

“The Havnot Male Voice Choir?”

“Yes.”

“The choir that meets in the church hall?”

“Yes.”

“The choir that sings?”

Harold looked at his son with mild irritation. “That is generally the activity associated with choirs, Timothy.”

Barbara folded the newspaper with unnecessary precision. “You can’t sing, Harold.”

“I can sing.”

“You hum flat during EastEnders.”

“That is not humming. That is quiet musical accompaniment.”

“You once sang ‘Abide with Me’ so slowly at a funeral that the organist nearly had to stop for lunch.”

Tim almost succeeded in not choking on a corn flake.

Harold adopted the expression he had used, during his years as a bank manager, when explaining overdraft limits to people who believed the phrase “personal flexibility” applied to money that did not exist.

“I am not proposing to sing solos, Barbara. I am simply proposing to join a group of men, once a week, in order to expand my social horizons.”

Tim knew at once what this meant. It meant that Harold wanted to get out of the house for a few hours without Barbara asking whether he had noticed the strange smell near the utility room, or whether his cardigan had always made him look “slightly abandoned.”

So, that Tuesday evening, Tim found himself driving his father to the church hall.

Harold sat upright in the passenger seat, wearing a jacket and tie, because he still believed one should make an effort when joining anything formal. He had also brought a pencil, a packet of mints, and his reading glasses in a hard case, as though the Havnot Male Voice Choir might unexpectedly require him to review mortgage applications.

“You don’t have to do this, Dad,” said Tim, not for the first time.

“I know.”

“And you understand there will be music.”

“I have grasped the basic concept.”

“And singing.”

“Yes, Timothy.”

“And Dennis Ackland.”

Harold frowned. “Who?”

“The conductor.”

“Ah.”

“He can be quite direct.”

“I have managed staff, Timothy. I am not afraid of directness.”

Tim considered explaining that Dennis Ackland’s version of directness was less like managing staff and more like being lightly shelled by artillery, but decided against it.

The church hall was already alive with the noises of rehearsal: chairs scraping, men greeting one another as if they had survived a minor war since last Tuesday, and Lionel Hargreaves at the piano, warming up his fingers on a Bach chorale with the expression of a man remembering better times.

Dennis Ackland stood at the front, hands behind his back, regarding the gathering with the steady disappointment of a weather-beaten prophet.

Tim approached him.

“Dennis, this is my father, Harold Keen. He’s recently moved to Havnot and wondered whether he might join the choir.”

Dennis looked Harold up and down.

“Can he sing?”

Tim hesitated. “Not really.”

“Can he read music?”

“No.”

“Does he know when to come in?”

“Almost certainly not.”

Dennis nodded. “Perfectly normal state of affairs for members of this choir.”

From the baritones, Dobbs said, “I heard that.”

“You can’t have,” said Dennis. “You always come in two bars late.”

Harold gave a small diplomatic smile, unsure whether he had just been welcomed or insulted.

Dennis beckoned him to the piano.

“We’ll see what you are.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Harold.

“Bass or tenor.”

“Sorry?”

“Low voice or high voice.”

“Ah. Why didn’t you say so?”

Lionel placed his hands on the keys with the expression of a man who once accompanied Emma Kirkby and was now reduced to this.

“Sing this note,” said Dennis.

Lionel played a note.

Harold sang something near it, though not close enough for it to feel claustrophobic.

Dennis said nothing.

Lionel tried another note.

Harold followed it at a respectful distance.

Dennis looked at him carefully. “Lower.”

Lionel played lower.

Harold produced a sound which seemed to emerge not so much from his throat as from a wardrobe being dragged across tarmac.

The basses looked up with interest.

Dennis nodded. “Bass. Probably.”

“Probably?” asked Harold.

“It’s a choir, Mr Keen, not a laboratory.”

And with that, Dennis steered Harold towards the bass section.

This was how Harold Keen, retired bank manager of Kingstown-on-Teign, husband of Barbara, father of Timothy, and man who had once chaired the Rotary Club accounts subcommittee for eleven consecutive years, found himself seated next to Paula Jenkins.

Paula was already there, large as life and twice as unbothered, wearing a sequinned scarf, a leopard-print cardigan, and the expression of a woman who had never once wondered whether she was too much.

She looked Harold up and down.

“New boy?”

Harold adjusted his glasses. “I suppose so.”

“I’m Paula.”

“Harold Keen.”

“Tim’s dad?”

“Yes.”

She leaned slightly closer. “You don’t look like him.”

“No,” said Harold, unsure whether this was a compliment.

“Mind you, he don’t look like himself half the time. Always worried, your Tim. Like a spaniel who’s lost a ball.”

Harold found himself unexpectedly fascinated. In all his years in banking, he had met formidable women, difficult women, elegant women, and one woman from Newton Abbot who had once threatened to close her account unless the bank sponsored her nephew’s ferret display. But he had never met anyone quite like Paula Jenkins.

She had the quality of a television character accidentally released into public life. She seemed to speak without a filter, move without apology, and occupy any room as if the planning permission had been granted retrospectively.

Dennis clapped his hands.

“Right. Since we have a new bass, and since morale is not yet low enough for the Welsh repertoire, we’ll begin with The Wellerman.”

There was a ripple of approval.

Lionel sighed. In F minor.

“The Wellerman?” said Harold.

“Sea shanty,” whispered Paula. “You’ll like it. Lots of shouting. Not much thinking.”

“I see.”

“You just come in when everyone else does.”

Harold nodded.

This proved to be poor advice.

Everyone else came in at once. Harold came in half a beat later, with great dignity, on the wrong word.

Dennis stopped them.

“Again.”

They began again.

This time Harold came in early, which showed initiative, if not accuracy.

Dennis stopped them again.

“Mr Keen, the aim is neither to anticipate the music nor to send it a forwarding address. Try listening.”

Harold coloured slightly.

Paula patted his knee. “Don’t worry. Dobbs has been here seven years and still thinks repeat marks are a Catholic conspiracy.”

“I heard that,” said Dobbs.

“No, you didn’t,” said Dennis. “You were on verse three.”

They began again.

‘Soon may the Wellerman come,

To bring us sugar and tea and rum…’

Paula gave Harold a playful dig in the ribs on the word “come.”

Harold looked startled.

“Are you all right?” he whispered.

Paula stared at him.

Then, slowly, a grin spread across her face.

“Oh, I’m going to enjoy you,” she said.

Harold had no idea why.

The choir thundered on. Horse sang as if hauling rope. Abe sang slightly below the pitch, but with complete confidence. Leslie, naturally, sang correctly. Kevin kept one eye on Horse and another on Paula, in case either required quiet management. Dobbs turned two pages at once and continued with the brave certainty of a man following an entirely different maritime tradition.

Harold did his best.

He missed “sugar.” He entered confidently on “tea” when everyone else was already halfway through “rum.” He spent the second verse trying to locate the first. By the third, he had abandoned words altogether and was making a low, industrious sound which suggested a distant tractor reversing into a shed.

But then came the final chorus.

Dennis raised both arms.

Lionel attacked the piano as if seeking damages.

The choir inhaled.

Harold watched Paula. Paula watched Dennis. Kevin watched Horse. Dobbs watched the wrong page. Everyone watched everyone else with the fragile hope that someone, somewhere, knew what was happening.

And then, somehow, miraculously, absurdly, Harold got it right.

On the final “Hey!” he came in exactly with the others.

Not before.

Not after.

Not in the neighbouring parish.

Exactly with them.

He even punched the air.

The effect was electric.

Paula let out a whoop and clapped Harold on the back with the full force of Christian encouragement.

Harold’s dentures shot forward, described a small but elegant arc, and landed in Dennis Ackland’s open copy of the music.

There was a silence.

This silence, unlike the one at breakfast, had comic timing.

Dennis looked down at the dentures.

Lionel removed his hands from the piano.

Dobbs crossed himself, though nobody was entirely sure why.

Paula whispered, “Well, that’s one way of marking the coda.”

Harold stared at the music folder in horror.

Tim, from near the door, closed his eyes and briefly wondered whether they still took on lighthouse keepers.

Dennis picked up the dentures between finger and thumb, with the solemnity of a priest elevating something theologically doubtful.

“Mr Keen,” he said, “I have conducted this choir through forgotten words, missing trousers, one fainting baritone, three separate arguments about Tom Jones, and an Advent concert in which the tenors entered during the raffle. But I will say this for you.”

Harold swallowed.

“You are the first bass to make a physical contribution to the score.”

The choir collapsed.

Even Lionel smiled, though only internally and under protest.

Harold retrieved his teeth, placed them carefully back in his mouth, and sat very still.

At the end of rehearsal, Paula tapped him on the shoulder rather more gently.

“You coming next week, Harold?”

Harold looked across the hall.

Dobbs was arguing with Leslie about whether The Wellerman counted as sacred music if sung sincerely. Horse was asking Kevin whether sugar, tea and rum were all equally necessary. Lionel was telling Dennis that if this repertoire continued he would fake his own death at the piano. Dennis was pretending to listen, while writing something in his notebook, which Harold strongly suspected was not praise.

Then he thought of Barbara.

Barbara, at home, waiting with EastEnders, an opinion about the stairlift installers, opinions about Harold’s preference for chips with everything, and a list of things about her appearance he had failed to notice since 1987.

Harold straightened his tie.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I shall.”

Paula beamed.

“Good man.”

Dennis Ackland, who had seen many things but never quite that, had indeed made a note in the margin beside Harold’s name:

BASS. NO MUSIC. ENTERS LATE. GOOD TEETH.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

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See yesterday’s post entitled ‘The Vicarage Prepares for Impact’ for the first part of this story.

Tim had spent the morning in a frenzy of readiness: making up the guest room, moving furniture by increments, checking medications, laying out towels, checking the carers’ rota, buying the biscuits his mother liked, and the rock buns that kept his father quiet. He also managed a brief, irrational argument with a kettle that seemed to be boiling too slowly out of spite.

The car arrived.

Tim went out to meet them with the fixed smile of a man determined to project warmth, capability, and the false impression that any of this was under control.

Harold emerged first, folding himself upwards from the passenger seat with the concentrated annoyance of a man betrayed by joints he had previously regarded as loyal. Barbara followed more slowly, one hand on the car door, one on her handbag, already looking at the front path as though it had personally offended her.

Tim kissed them both, took bags, asked after the journey, lied that everything was fine, and brought them to the front door.

Barbara stopped at the first half-step.

“What’s that?”

“A half-step.”

“It’s slippery.”

“It’s anti-slip.”

“It looks slippery.”

Harold peered at it. “Why is it there?”

“So the main step isn’t such a stretch.”

Harold considered this. “I could trip over that.”

“You could trip over anything, Dad.”

“Well, that’s cheerful.”

Inside, Barbara stood in the hall and looked up at the stairlift with the expression of a woman who had entered a hotel and found agricultural equipment hanging from the banister.

“What is that?”

“It’s a stairlift.”

“I know it’s a stairlift, Timothy. I’m asking why it’s in your house.”

“So you can get upstairs safely.”

Barbara put her lips together. “It goes very slowly.”

“You haven’t been on it yet.”

“I can tell by looking.”

Harold, who had taken to it more readily, lowered himself experimentally into the chair and pressed the button. The stairlift began its ascent with all the urgency of a diplomatic apology.

Barbara watched it. “Good heavens. He might get there by Advent.”

The sofa did not go much better.

Tim ushered them into the sitting room with the hopeful air of a man unveiling a solution. Barbara sat down, or rather attempted to sit down, discovered that the sofa was now higher than expected, and landed with a small thump of outrage.

“Oh,” she said. “Well. This is ridiculous.”

“Is it uncomfortable?”

“My feet don’t touch the floor.”

Harold lowered himself onto the other cushion, paused, and then, to Tim’s relief, stood up again quite easily.

“That,” said Harold, “is actually not bad.”

Barbara glared at him as though he had defected ideologically. “It’s too high.”

“It’s easier to get out of.”

“I don’t want easier. I want normal.”

Tim looked at the sofa, the blocks, the cable ties, the entire magnificent absurdity of it, and had the sudden, sinking awareness that nearly every improvement age required came with the spiritual disadvantage of looking like a Blue Peter art project.

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and Mrs Ali arrived for the evening call.

She entered with cheerful authority, greeted Tim’s parents as though they had always known one another, and within five minutes had established a tone in which no nonsense would be entertained from anybody.

“So,” she said, crouching slightly to Barbara’s eye level, “I hear you have opinions.”

Barbara, who respected firmness when she met it, said, “Only on obvious things.”

“Good. Keeps the blood moving. Now. We are going to make this work, yes? You two are going to let your son help you without behaving as if he has committed a war crime by buying a toilet frame.”

Harold, to Tim’s astonishment, laughed.

Mrs Ali straightened up and glanced around the room. “And this sofa,” she said. “It is terrible. But useful. Sometimes this is life.”

Tim could have hugged her.

That first evening went, on the whole, as well as it could have done. Bags were unpacked. Pills were sorted. Complaints were voiced in manageable quantities. Tea was made. Barbara conceded that the downstairs toilet arrangement was “not entirely idiotic.” Harold admitted that the stairlift, once experienced, was “less humiliating than falling downstairs.” These, Tim judged, were victories.

Supper was taken with relative peace. Barbara ate little, but enough. Harold was more animated than he had sounded on the phone for weeks. The room settled. Lamps were on. Outside, the Vicarage garden darkened into one of those gentle Hampshire evenings in which birds continue sounding optimistic long after human beings have given up.

Tim began, for the first time in days, to think that perhaps it might be all right.

It was then that Barbara, who had the timing of a sniper, put down her fork, looked directly at him and said, “So. Have you found a woman yet?”

Tim nearly inhaled a pea.

Harold looked into his plate with the expression of a man who had seen this ambush prepared in advance and chosen not to intervene.

“Mum,” said Tim.

“Well?”

“I’m forty-something, not six.”

“And yet the question remains.”

Mrs Ali, who was in the kitchen rinsing a mug and very likely listening, went quiet.

Barbara dabbed her mouth. “I only ask because one does begin to wonder.”

“About what?”

“About whether this is all there is.”

Tim stared at her. “You’ve been in the house six hours.”

“Yes, and I’ve already seen enough filing trays to know that left to yourself you will die alphabetised.”

Harold gave a small involuntary cough which was, unmistakably, laughter.

Tim put down his fork. “I am not discussing my personal life over fish pie.”

“Why not? It’s one of the great British traditions.”

“There is no personal life to discuss.”

Barbara’s eyes narrowed slightly in the way Tim knew from childhood meant she had spotted movement in the undergrowth.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s not quite true.”

Tim felt the dangerous warmth of a man who realises, too late, that his face has betrayed him.

Harold looked up now, mildly interested. “Is there someone, then?”

“No.”

Barbara smiled the smile of a woman to whom “no” had always meant “continue.”

“No one at all?”

Tim reached for his glass. “Not in any meaningful sense.”

Mrs Ali re-entered the room carrying a folder of care notes and sat very still in the armchair.

Barbara said, “Ah.”

Tim made the mistake of answering. “Ah what?”

“That is not the voice of a man with nobody in mind.”

“There is nobody in mind.”

“There is somebody adjacent to mind.”

“Mum.”

“Someone local?”

“No.”

“Someone from church?”

“Not exactly.”

Barbara sat back, triumphant. “Parish-adjacent.”

Tim closed his eyes briefly.

Harold, who had now become genuinely interested in a way he had not been in most matters for months, said, “Do we know her?”

“No.”

“Is it a her?”

Tim looked at the ceiling as though seeking immediate admission into heaven.

Mrs Ali, with immense dignity, said, “Reverend, blink twice if you need me to intervene.”

Barbara turned to her. “You see? There is someone.”

Mrs Ali spread her hands. “Madam, I have learned many things in care work. One of them is that mothers can smell a secret at twenty paces.”

The silence that followed was so rich, so charged, and so catastrophically full of possibilities that Tim understood at once that he had already lost. He might refuse names. He might deny detail. He might try to bury the matter under liturgy, administrative paperwork, or an unexpected diocesan emergency. It would make no difference. Something had been detected. A trail had been found. His mother, his father, Mrs Ali, and before long half of Havnot, would now proceed on the cheerful assumption that somewhere within parish orbit a woman existed who had lately taken up more of the Rector’s thoughts than was altogether prudent.

Barbara reached for her tea and said, with calm satisfaction, “Well. That’s something to look forward to.”

And Tim, who had spent three months organising stairlifts, toilet frames, care rotas, legal calls, half-steps, prescriptions and the safe transfer of elderly parents from one fragile stage of life into another, found that the thing most likely to undo him was still a woman at the dining table saying, in a tone of practical inquiry, what every mother has said since civilisation began.

So, have you found a woman yet?

By the following morning Judith Crowther noticed that Tim looked unusually hunted, Horse remarked that he had “the face of a man whose house has developed weather,” and Sandy, after one glance, said, “What’s happened?”

Tim replied, “Nothing.”

Which, in Havnot, was as good as a press release.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

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The trouble had begun, as so many troubles in England do, with a flat that was notionally “progressing.”

Harold and Barbara Keen had had an offer accepted on a supported living flat in Havnot the previous November. Since then, according to the estate agent, “things were moving.” This was one of those expressions which, in the English property market, covers a multitude of sins and almost no movement at all. Bits of paper had apparently been seen. Solicitors had apparently “raised enquiries.” Somebody somewhere had been “waiting to hear back.” Tim had reached the point where he suspected that the entire legal profession existed chiefly to move one PDF at a time from one inbox to another until everyone involved died.

Meanwhile Harold, whose relationship with the ground had grown increasingly intimate, had begun falling over with enough regularity to make the situation feel less like delay and more like hazard. Barbara, though outwardly brisk, had also reached that stage of life at which stairs, baths, low chairs and badly placed rugs all seemed to have entered into a private conspiracy against her.

So Tim, after a difficult fortnight of phone calls, calculations, pastoral guilt and muttered swearing in the study, did what many children eventually do: he decided that until the flat was ready, his parents would come to stay at the Vicarage.

This was, in principle, an act of love.

In practice, it turned the Vicarage into something between a care home, an obstacle course, and a village production of The Wrong Trousers.

The first issue was the staircase.

The Vicarage staircase, like many Victorian staircases, had apparently been designed in an age when people were expected either to be young forever or to die suddenly. It was steep, narrow and judgemental towards anyone with creaking joints. Tim therefore arranged for a stairlift.

This was fitted over the course of a Tuesday by two men from Petersfield who spoke very little but looked at the house with the grave expression of men who had seen things. By the time they had finished, a beige mechanical chair now clung to the staircase like a resigned insect.

“It’ll do the job,” one of them said.

“It does rather dominate the hall,” said Tim.

The man looked at him. “It’s a stairlift, mate. Not a watercolour.”

Then there were the steps. There turned out to be steps everywhere. Steps into the house, steps out of the house, a small but treacherous change in level between the kitchen and utility area, and a threshold by the back door which Tim had lived with for eleven years without noticing but was now convinced it had been laid by Satan himself.

Horse Palmer was enlisted. He arrived with bits of timber, a drill, cable ties, a bag of screws of uncertain provenance, and the serene expression of a man for whom all domestic difficulty could be overcome by the contents of his shed.

“Needs half-steps,” he said, after surveying the front path.

“Yes,” said Tim. “Can one buy those?”

Horse looked faintly disappointed. “Could. But, never fear. I have wood.”

By Thursday there were indeed half-steps everywhere. Some were attached. Some were braced. Some merely lurked with confidence. All had the unmistakable air of having been designed under conditions of mild urgency by a man convinced that straight lines were for cowards.

The sofa was worse.

Harold and Barbara’s current mode of sitting down and standing up involved a degree of effort and noise that suggested either mechanical failure or a minor exorcism. Tim therefore mentioned, over beer in the Little John, that he might need to raise the sitting room sofa.

Horse nodded. “Blocks.”

“Proper ones?”

“Wood’ll do.”

The following day the sofa stood four inches higher on stout lumps of timber secured with enough cable ties to restrain a small rhinoceros. It was, Tim had to admit, effective. It was also one unexpected movement away from making the national news.

“You sure that’s safe?” asked Sandy, standing in the doorway.

Horse, who had by now developed the air of a man being questioned by fools, said, “Safer than old people trying to get out of low furniture.”

Then there were the toilet arrangements, if the reader will forgive the indelicacy of essentials.

There are few experiences in adult life that prepare one for the experience of standing in a medical supply shop, discussing raised toilet seat frames with a woman called Denise while trying not to imagine one’s parents using them. Tim bore it with the stoicism of a man who had once chaired a stewardship meeting about loo roll usage and had therefore already lost much of his natural modesty.

By the end of the week the Vicarage had acquired two toilet frames, three grab rails, a bath board, one anti-slip mat, several packets of incontinence products hidden in a cupboard that would have fooled no-one, and a perching stool-whose very name, embarrassingly, felt like something from a racy movie.

It was, as Judith Crowther observed when she came to drop off parish correspondence, “all very sensible.”

She paused in the hall and looked up at the stairlift.

“And at the same time,” she added, “completely ghastly.”

“Thank you, Judith.”

“I mean that kindly.”

“I know.”

“It now resembles a medium-security Christian institution.”

The one wholly cheering development in all this was care.

Tim had already had dealings, in a parish capacity, with ‘Havnot a Care’, a local domiciliary agency whose name suggested either admirable bluntness or a nervous breakdown in marketing. He rang them partly in hope and partly in desperation, explained the situation, and was delighted to find that because he had once helped the manager’s nephew get married in spite of a row over a tribute band, some modest reduction in fees might perhaps be arranged.

“Mates’ rates,” said the manager grandly, as if conferring a knighthood.

“Mates’ rates?” said Tim.

“Well, church rates.”

“I’m not sure those are a recognised category.”

“They are in Havnot.”

Thus it was that Mrs Ali, the magnificent Mrs Ali, began arriving at the Vicarage at seven-thirty each morning and again at seven in the evening.

Tim knew her already, of course. Everyone at St Faithful’s knew Mrs Ali. Her samosas had become so established a feature of Harvest that some members of the congregation now regarded them as part of the biblical tradition. She was in her early fifties, brisk without being unkind, wholly immune to fuss, and possessed that rare gift of making people do what was necessary while leaving them the impression that this had been their own decision all along.

She also regarded Christians with an affectionate theological suspicion.

“I like your lot,” she said on the first morning she came to assess the arrangements, standing in the sitting room with her coat still on and surveying the raised sofa. “You are good people. Very helpful. Very generous. But honestly, Reverend, you are all a bit strange.”

“In what way?”

She gestured lightly. “Candles. Bells. Processions. You all stand up and sit down so much. And that man with the organ — what is his problem?”

“Lionel?”

“Yes. Him. His face always looks like someone has served him a disappointing potato.”

Tim laughed. “That’s simply how Lionel expresses joy.”

Mrs Ali snorted. “Well. Jesus was a mighty prophet, peace be upon him, and I respect your faith. But if he comes back to earth and sees that sofa, he may turn round and leave again.”

The day of Arrival finally came.

But that’s a story for tomorrow...

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe.

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Share

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In recent months, the fictional parish of St Faithful’s, Havnot, has become a surprising point of national interest, thanks to the writings of Canon Tom Kennar. Readers across the world have followed the parish’s sagas involving vergers, rotas, liturgical anxieties, parish politics, accidental theology, and the sort of coffee that causes one to re-evaluate one’s beliefs about the Second Coming. The Havnot Observer sat down with Rev’d Dr Timothy Keen to ask how it feels to find one’s parish suddenly discussed rather more widely than is decent.

Observer: Father Tim, how does it feel to find St Faithful’s suddenly famous?

Tim: I don’t think “famous” is quite the word. “Mildly exposed” would be nearer. “Parish life with the hedge removed.” “Being observed by strangers while carrying folding tables.” Something in that area.

Also, fame suggests a certain glamour, and there is very little glamour available on site. The church hall still smells of old hymn books and radiator dust, and only last week I spent a full quarter of an hour looking for a missing extension lead which turned out to be in the place everyone said it would be.

Observer: How do you feel about Canon Tom raking up St Faithful’s dirty laundry and spreading it all over the internet?

Tim: Well, first of all, I reject the term “dirty laundry.” Some of it is only mildly creased. Some of it, indeed, is ecclesiastically laundered.

But I take your point. There are certainly moments when I have thought it might be nice if our internal confusions remained internal. There is a certain vulnerability in seeing the life of the parish — its squabbles, weaknesses, peculiar obsessions, and nervous little habits — laid out for public enjoyment like items in a church bazaar.

On the other hand, it has to be admitted that churches do contain these things. If anything, St Faithful’s is restrained. A real parish has all of this and more, generally before 10.15am.

I think what Tom has grasped, irritatingly well, is that the Church is funniest at exactly the point where it is trying hardest to be dignified. That is not always comfortable for those of us charged with maintaining the dignity, especially those appointed to the ministry of pointy hats. But it is, unfortunately, true.

Observer: Why do you think Canon Tom does not write about his own church?

Tim: Self-preservation, one assumes.

It is one thing to turn parish life into literature. It is another to do so while continuing to rely on volunteers, musicians, and people willing to count cash after a fundraiser. One must think strategically.

Also, I suspect he understands that St Faithful’s works because it is not one church. It is a composite. A parish concentrate. A reduction sauce made from years of ecclesiastical observation, gently simmered until only the strongest flavours remain: panic, loyalty, eccentricity, passive aggression, cake, incense and surprisingly often, grace.

If he wrote directly about his own church, it would become awkwardly specific. People would begin recognising themselves, which is always entertaining in principle and catastrophic in practice.

But I have to concede that Tom is not exposing our sins so much as our textures. And textures are where parish life actually happens. Very little of church life consists of majestic theological clarity. Most of it consists of trying to serve Christ while somebody cannot find a match for the candles with five minutes to go.

Observer: What does the popularity of St Faithful’s say about the public attitude towards the established church today?

Tim: I think it suggests that the public is not quite as uninterested in the Church as the Church periodically decides it is.

There is, I think, a continuing appetite for the parish church as an idea. Not always for doctrine, still less for committees, but certainly for the notion that somewhere in the middle of ordinary English life there remains a place where candles are lit, the dead are named, babies are welcomed, people sing badly together, and someone passes coffee through a hatch, while apologising that proper milk was not, once again, thought necessary.

The Church of England has spent a good many years worrying that nobody notices it anymore. And then it turns out that quite a lot of people do notice — just not necessarily for the reasons we had in the strategy documents.

What people seem to like about St Faithful’s is not excellence. That is fortunate. It is recognisability. They see in it an institution that is ancient and ridiculous and touching all at once. Which, as brand identities go, could be worse.

Observer: Has any of the publicity led people seriously to question their faith — or their atheism?

Tim: Yes, though not in the cinematic way one might hope. We have not yet had scenes of hardened sceptics collapsing in tears beside the biscuit table. Nor, regrettably, have we had long-standing evangelicals renouncing biblical inerrancy because of a story about Judith and the photocopier.

But I have certainly encountered people who say the stories have unsettled them. Atheists, sometimes, are surprised to find church people represented as intelligent, self-aware, and intermittently funny, which had not always formed part of the stereotype. Christians, meanwhile, are occasionally startled to discover that doubt has been present in the building all along and has not, in fact, brought the roof down.

So yes, minds have shifted. Not usually with a trumpet blast. More with the sort of small internal rearrangement by which a person concedes, against expectation, that these church people may not be complete idiots after all.

Which, in missionary terms, is not nothing.

Observer: Are you at all concerned that so much of the life of your church seems to take place in a pub?

Tim: Concerned is perhaps too strong a word. Mildly chastened, from time to time.

Though one should say at once that this is hardly a new problem. Christianity has always had a complicated relationship with tables, cups, fellowship, and people saying more than they meant after the second round. If one reads the New Testament carefully, one finds that the early Church was not exactly born in a filing cabinet. And it’s not many centuries past that English parishes actually ran most of the pubs of the land.

Also, it is worth remembering that a pub is one of the last places in English life where people still speak with any real frankness. In church halls people say, “That’s an interesting suggestion,” and mean, “Over my dead body.” In pubs they are at least more likely to say what the interesting suggestion actually is, and why it ought never to have been brought near a parish.

So yes, a certain amount of the real business gets done there. Not always the official business, obviously. Judith would want that very firmly stated. But the human business, certainly: grievances aired, sadnesses half-confessed, impossible ideas proposed, friendships repaired, theological speculations attempted, and from time to time Horse being prevented by Kevin from saying something that would require three follow-up meetings and a pastoral apology.

I would not want the public to imagine that St Faithful’s has replaced the sacraments with a round of ale. But it is true that a surprising amount of parish discernment appears to occur somewhere between first pint and last orders.

And if I may be very serious for half a moment, the Church has always gone where people actually are. If people still gather in pubs to talk honestly about life, failure, loneliness, God, death, politics, marriage, disappointment, and whether Lionel is taking the anthem too quickly, then I would rather the Church was somehow present there than absent on principle.

Though I do admit there are evenings when one looks round the Little John and thinks, with some weariness, that if the Kingdom of God has come near, it has done so accompanied by pork scratchings.

Observer: Are you getting any sleep at night? And how are your colleagues enjoying all the attention?

Tim: Sleep is always available in theory.

In practice, parish clergy have always lain awake at odd hours wondering whether they accidentally offended a donor, forgot a pastoral detail, or approved the wrong shade of notice-sheet paper. The recent attention has merely added new material to the nocturnal repertoire.

As for colleagues, reactions vary. Judith regards publicity as a regrettable side-effect of modern decline and would prefer the parish to remain known only to those with legitimate business on site. She particularly dislikes what she calls “the tourism of amusement,” by which she means people turning up to look at the church as though Dobbs might emerge from a side chapel and do one of his sayings.

Lionel affects contempt, but he is not above enjoying messages from strangers praising the musical life of the parish, especially when he can read them in a tone suggesting they have at last recognised civilisation.

Sandy finds the whole thing hilarious, which is probably why she will outlive the rest of us. She has, I fear, enjoyed watching the Church be interpreted through the lens of its own comic failure. She says it is healthy. I suspect she is right, which is annoying.

Dobbs disapproves of the whole business in principle, chiefly because he believes public attention encourages slackness, modernity, and a dangerous willingness to tamper with custom. On the other hand, he has preserved three particularly favourable mentions in a labelled plastic folder, so one must make of that what one can.

Horse seems to think this level of public interest is simply one more feature of existence, like slurry or caravans. He has managed to maintain his usual philosophical steadiness, by which I mean he says, “Well, there we are,” in the tone of a man observing weather. Kevin does what Kevin always does, which is quietly manage the human consequences of Horse having opinions in public.

The odd thing is that most of them have borne it rather well. There has been remarkably little outrage, considering. A few private mutterings, naturally. But this is England. Private muttering is our most sincere form of emotional disclosure.

Observer: What would you say are the defining characteristics of St Faithful’s, as it has now been presented to the world?

Tim: Endurance, mainly.

St Faithful’s is not distinguished by trendiness, efficiency, or what diocesan literature likes to call “dynamic growth culture.” It is distinguished by the fact that, against a good deal of evidence, it is still here.

People keep turning up. The dead are buried. The sacraments happen. The heating fails. Someone finds the spare key. Someone else loses the hall booking diary. A tenor sings with confidence rather than pitch. Tea is made. The Kingdom of God advances by approximately three inches and then pauses for a rota disagreement.

That, to me, is the essence of St Faithful’s. It is not impressive in the way institutions like to be impressive. It is faithful in the much less marketable sense of continuing.

Also, if one is honest, St Faithful’s is held together by women. This is true of a very great many churches, though men continue to hold discussions about it as if they have just discovered gravity. Remove the women of St Faithful’s and within a fortnight the place would consist of an unlocked vestry, a puzzled organist, and me trying to remember where the pastoral care list lives.

Observer: Why does Jesus Christ rarely get a specific mention in many of the stories?

Tim: Because most people who mention Jesus all the time are, sadly, not always talking very much about him.

That sounds more acidic than I intend it, though only slightly.

The stories are about the sort of lives faith actually inhabits: the muddle, the longing, the habit, the embarrassment, the small kindnesses, the accumulated griefs, the half-belief of people who still turn up to unlock the church, stack the chairs, or make sure Mrs Frobisher gets home after the service. Jesus is present in all of that, whether or not someone mentions him by name every four sentences.

In fact, one might argue that one of the problems with modern Christianity is not that it mentions Jesus too little, but that it often mentions him too cheaply. Too glibly. Too early. Before anybody has actually looked at the human situation into which he might have something to say.

The stories tend to begin with the human comedy. That is where most of us actually live. If Christ is there — and I think he is — then one may trust the reader to notice him in due course, perhaps while laughing at a churchwarden.

Observer: Finally, Father Tim, what do you make of your author, Tom Kennar?

Tim: I think “author” is a dangerously theological term. But as to Tom, I regard him with the mixed feelings one reserves for a relative who is affectionate, but not to be trusted with private information.

He is clearly very fond of the Church. No one could write this way who was not. But he is also entirely willing to expose its pomposities, evasions, and absurd little vanities to broad daylight, which can make him trying company for those of us still attempting to maintain a facial expression appropriate to the office we hold.

And however irritating Tom may occasionally be from our point of view, the thing is plainly written with affection. No one writes Lionel that accurately without having loved and suffered with other church musicians. No one writes Judith that well without having been saved, repeatedly, by women whose administrative competence is one of the secret pillars of the Body of Christ.

The Church should perhaps be grateful when someone sees it clearly enough to laugh and still loves it enough not to despise it. That combination is rarer than one might wish.

And I think that is why people respond to it.

Observer: Do you expect the interest to last?

Tim: Of course not.

Public attention is notoriously unstable. This week they are interested in St Faithful’s. Next week it will be a Labrador that can ring a bell for sausages.

The important thing is not whether the attention lasts, but whether anything true has been glimpsed while it was here. If readers have seen, even for a moment, that the parish church is not a museum piece or a moral lecture with gutters, but a strange and fragile community in which grace continues to operate among the baffled, the difficult, the lonely, and the overcommitted, then something worthwhile has been done.

Though I would also add that if any of this fame leads to a significant increase in unrestricted giving, we shall naturally discern the hand of Providence in that as well.

At this point the interview ended because Judith entered the room holding a ring binder and looking like a woman who had discovered that something had once again been done informally and without anyone having consulted her first.

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun . Paid subscribers to this Substack can also read it online for no additional charge.

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of ‘The Parish Life’ and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe .

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

There are some Sundays at St Faithful’s when one senses, even before the first hymn, that the day will not proceed according to the laminated expectations of the rota.

This feeling began at approximately 9.17am, when Audrey Black, chatting with a group of friends outside the church door, narrowed her eyes and said, “What on earth is that?”

What it was, at first sight, appeared to be some form of devotional vehicle. It came slowly but majestically up through the lych-gate from the road with all the solemn inevitability of a parade float that had taken a wrong turn on its way to both a chapel anniversary and the Eurovision Song Contest. It was, underneath the decoration, a mobility scooter. But only underneath. In its present state it had become something else entirely.

Extra lights had been fixed around the frame in colours not usually associated with either good taste or low-power efficiency. Tinsel wound itself round the handlebars with the confidence of something that had once seen a Christmas tree and decided to improve upon the idea. From the back flew a small Welsh flag pennant. Across the front fairing, secured with an optimism that would not have satisfied a proper engineer, there shone a large battery-lit cross which blinked gently in red and blue, as though salvation itself had been fitted with an aftermarket display panel.

“It’s like the Book of Revelation,” said Maureen, who often said things were like the Book of Revelation without any great evidence of having read it.

“It’s like Bognor Regis on a bank holiday,” said Sally Tiredwell.

Peregrine Wainwright, who regarded novelty with the expression of a man watching ivy advance across a listed wall, adjusted his deerstalker and said, “I do not think that is road legal.”

The scooter came to a halt before them with a tiny flourish of electronic whirring. Its rider turned her head, lifted sparkly sunglasses, and beamed upon the little congregation of gawkers with such fearless delight that, for a moment, all four were robbed of the sort of remark they would later wish they had made first.

She wore a large floppy bonnet in some bright, unrepentant shade between coral and astonishment. Her clothes were multicoloured in a manner that suggested several tropical birds had reached a democratic compromise. There were bangles. There were scarves. There was lipstick applied with cheerful decisiveness rather than caution. Behind it all, and in no way hidden by any of it, there remained the unmistakable shape of a person who had lived many years in a body formed by testosterone: broad frame, strong bones, a chin that had not entirely surrendered, and the faintest shadow of beard. Yet none of this seemed to trouble her in the slightest. She sat amid the lights and the tinsel like a queen in temporary command of a very small but loyal nation.

“Morning, loves,” she said. “Am I in time, or has God started without me?”

There are moments in parish life when the ordinary machinery of English reaction simply fails to engage. This was one of them. Audrey made a noise in her throat which might, in more favourable circumstances, have developed into a sentence. Maureen smiled the fixed smile of a woman who could tolerate almost anything provided it did not become her problem. Sally, whose social instincts were better than most, said, “You’re in good time, dear,” while Perry continued to look as though he might appeal to the bishop, the police, and perhaps the Automobile Association.

At that moment Alan Dobbs emerged from the church porch in his verger’s gown, wearing the expression of a man already carrying eight separate disappointments before the service had even begun.

“Why has everybody stopped?” he demanded. “If we all loiter out here, there’ll be a bottleneck at the—”

Then he saw the scooter.

Then he saw the cross.

Then he saw the Welsh flag.

Then he saw the rider.

The rider saw him too, and her whole face lit up.

“Alan!” she cried. “Alan Dobbs! That’s you, isn’t it?”

Dobbs stopped dead. His eyes narrowed. He leaned forward. One could almost hear drawers opening and shutting in the attic of his memory. The bonnet, the glasses, the lipstick, the scarves, the lights, the astonishing confidence of it all — none of it fitted any known category. At last he stepped closer, peered beneath the brim of the bonnet, and said, with the baffled tenderness of a man discovering his childhood has unexpectedly changed clothes, “Paul?”

The rider grinned.

“It’s Paula now, mate, if you please.”

No one spoke.

Dobbs blinked once. Then twice. Then his face did something terribly complicated. For a brief instant he seemed not merely surprised but divided against himself, as though his memories were hurrying in from forty years ago and finding no available chair.

Paul. Or Paula. The boy from the terrace. The one he had scrumped apples with until old Mrs Kettering came out waving a broom. The one who had helped him build a ramp out of stolen bricks and a tea chest in order to jump a Raleigh Chopper over the ditch near Havnot Woods. The one who had once thrown a firecracker into an empty barrel behind the Little John and convinced young Dobbs that the Germans had come back. All of that now stood before him in bangles and a bonnet on a mobility scooter that looked like a chapel fête had collided with a circus.

Dobbs opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Paula again. Looked at the others. Then, without a word, he turned round and walked stiffly away down the path beside the yew trees.

“Alan?” called Sally.

But Dobbs did not stop. He had the stride of a man not fleeing exactly, but urgently seeking a larger internal room than the one he was currently using.

He found Horse Palmer in the churchyard,

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The invitation arrived on paper so thick and creamy that Perry Wainwright held it up to the light before opening it, as though checking whether it might also function as a modest draught excluder.

It bore, at the top, the crest of the Diocese, embossed in gold, with enough heraldic flourish to suggest that what followed would concern either the renewal of the church’s missionary life or the declaration of war against France.

Judith Crowther, who had brought it into the Vicar’s office on a tray with the air of one transporting a constitutional document, announced that it had come directly from the Bishop’s office and had been marked Important.

Tim Keen looked at it with the weary caution of a man who had learned that the word important, when used in diocesan correspondence, generally meant either mandatory consultation, strategic listening exercise, or fresh paperwork for which nobody in a parish had the time, energy, or emotional stability.

Sandy Lintel read over his shoulder.

“The latest plans for the Diocesan Mission Strategy,” she said. “There’s a phrase to chill the blood.”

“It means a day in a meeting room,” said Tim, “while somebody with a lanyard explains that the future of Christian witness depends upon a laminated flowchart.”

“They may have pastries,” said Sandy.

“They may,” Tim conceded.

That, however, was not enough to cheer anyone.

For all four of those invited—Tim, Sandy, Perry, and Sally Tiredwell—held, in their different ways, to the same basic conviction, namely that mission did not begin when a diocesan committee produced a vision document with arrows on it. Mission began in kitchens, doorways, foodbanks, hospital corridors, school gates, pub conversations, funeral visits, and all those other untidy places where actual human beings were to be found. It grew from below, from the life of ordinary parish people, not from the majestic descent of strategy from above like Moses carrying PowerPoint from Sinai.

Still, the invitation had come on very posh paper.

And there was a whispered suggestion, tucked rather coyly into the final paragraph, that a number of grant opportunities might in due course become available to parishes able to demonstrate appropriate engagement with the diocesan framework.

This had the effect of making refusal feel not merely ungracious but financially irresponsible.

So it was agreed, not joyfully but with a collective air of Christian martyrdom, that they would go.

The practical question of transport was settled by Perry.

“I should be delighted to drive,” he said, with the soft courtesy of a man who considered both diction and cufflinks to be marks of civilisation. “The old girl could do with a run.”

Now, at St Faithful’s, the phrase the old girl had previously been used by Perry of his aunt Lavinia, an umbrella stand, and once, rather movingly, the church boiler. There was therefore a moment of uncertainty.

“What old girl?” asked Sally.

“My Rolls.”

There was a small silence.

“The Rolls?” said Sandy.

“Indeed. 1986. Still a magnificent machine, naturally, though one does have to keep these things moving. Leave them standing too long and they become offended.”

This was received with the sort of reverent attention usually reserved for relics.

Nobody at St Faithful’s had ever actually travelled in Perry’s Rolls-Royce, though everyone knew of its existence. It was one of those parish facts, like the existence of the silver processional cross or Lionel’s belief that Stanford marked the beginning of musical decline. The car was spoken of often, glimpsed seldom, and invested by rumour with the qualities of a minor royal residence.

When Perry pulled up outside the church on the appointed morning, the effect was considerable.

It was enormous. It was black. It shone with the dark authority of an Edwardian magistrate. The chrome gleamed. The interior, glimpsed through the opened door, appeared to contain more leather than a gentleman’s club and more polished wood than a cathedral choir stall.

Perry himself emerged in driving gloves.

He then hurried round the car to open the rear door for Sally, then the other rear door for Sandy, and finally the front passenger door for Tim, all with such grave old-world ceremony that one half expected him to employ the phrase Your carriage, madam.

“Well,” said Sally, sinking into the rear seat, “this is lovely.”

“It’s like being upholstered inside a sideboard,” said Sandy, running a hand appreciatively over the walnut veneer.

Tim settled into the front with the mild pleasure of a man who had not expected luxury to play any role in a diocesan meeting.

Then Perry started the engine.

It did not so much start as awaken. Somewhere under the vast bonnet there came a low, muscular murmur, the sound of restrained wealth remembering that it had once ruled an empire.

Perry smiled. “There we are.”

They glided out of the churchyard with all the dignity of a state procession.

For roughly two minutes, it was bliss.

The ride was smooth, silent, almost ecclesial in its calm. Houses slipped by. The spring light lay gently on Havnot. Tim began to think that if one must go and hear about the Diocesan Mission Strategy, there were worse ways of approaching one’s fate than in a Rolls-Royce under the command of a well-mannered churchwarden.

Then they reached the bypass.

What happened next was, for the passengers, not so much a change in driving style as the revelation of an entirely hidden personality.

Perry, who in ordinary parish life was mild, punctilious, and capable of apologising to a chair if he bumped into it, underwent a transformation so sudden and so complete that Tim later felt it ought properly to have required a liturgical response.

A hatchback pulled into Perry’s lane some distance ahead.

Perry’s expression hardened at once.

He advanced upon it with terrible resolve.

The great car surged forward. The distance between Rolls and hatchback diminished at alarming speed until, to Tim’s eye, they were separated by little more than faith and excellent engineering.

Perry gave a sharp, disgusted click of the tongue.

“Come along, man,” he muttered.

The hatchback, whose driver was almost certainly already doing the legal speed limit and minding his own business, failed to vanish instantly from existence.

Perry flashed his lights.

Nothing.

He sounded the horn.

It was not a vulgar horn. It was a grand, authoritative note, like an irritated baritone in a civic procession. But used at six feet from another motorist’s rear bumper, it lost some of its natural dignity.

“Oh my word,” whispered Sally from the back.

Sandy had gone very still.

Perry swerved into the inside lane, pressed the accelerator, undertook the hatchback with stately fury, and returned to the outer lane before the others had fully understood what had occurred.

“What on earth was that?” said Tim.

Perry did not look at him.

“That,” he said, “was a man with no sense whatever of road discipline.”

Over the next ten minutes, a pattern established itself.

Any driver who failed immediately to do exactly what Perry wished was treated as a personal affront to civilisation.

He rode close behind them. He muttered. He clicked his tongue. He accelerated with V8 vengeance. He flashed. He hooted. He executed overtaking manoeuvres with the cold decisiveness of a cavalry officer disappointed in the infantry.

The interior of the Rolls remained, absurdly, a haven of upholstered refinement. The wood gleamed. The seats caressed. The suspension floated. One could easily imagine oneself being conveyed gently to Glyndebourne, were it not for the fact that one was also apparently participating in a mechanised campaign against every other driver in Hampshire.

Sally, in the rear seat, had gripped the leather strap beside the window with the expression of a woman reciting inward prayers not all of which were from authorised liturgy.

Sandy stared fixedly ahead in the way of someone trying to keep breakfast in its proper place by moral effort alone.

Tim, after a particularly violent acceleration past a family saloon, said as evenly as he could, “Perry, are you quite all right?”

“Perfectly,” said Perry, overtaking a van. “Though I am surrounded by imbeciles.”

He jabbed a finger at the windscreen.

“Look at that fellow. Middle lane. Entirely empty lane to the left. Entirely empty. Yet there he sits. Occupying space without purpose. It is the modern disease.”

“That woman,” he added, as a small blue car hesitated before changing lanes, “has almost certainly not looked properly in her mirrors.”

Sandy found her voice. “Perhaps she has.”

Perry gave a short laugh of bitter disbelief.

“My dear Sandy, half the women on the roads of England use the mirror chiefly to check whether they remain presentable.”

There was a silence in the car so profound that even the engine seemed briefly to sense theological danger.

Sally said, in a voice of icy restraint, “Perry.”

“I speak in general terms,” said Perry quickly, though not apologetically. “Naturally excluding present company.”

“Very generous,” said Sandy faintly.

A white SUV failed to move out of Perry’s way at once.

Perry leaned on the horn.

Tim closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “So,” he said, “what you’re saying is that every other driver on the road is an idiot.”

Perry considered this.

“Yes,” he said. “Broadly.”

Tim nodded slowly. “Have you ever considered that if one man thinks the rest of the world has gone mad, the more likely explanation may be that the man in question is the one who has himself gone mad?”

This landed.

One could see it land.

Perry did not reply at once. His jaw shifted slightly. His hands remained at ten and two. He eased off the accelerator by what Tim judged to be approximately five miles an hour.

He also dropped back from the car in front by perhaps six inches.

It was not much. But in spiritual terms it was a beginning.

“My driving,” said Perry after a while, “is perfectly competent.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Tim. “That’s not really the point.”

“People are selfish,” Perry said. “They drift. They dither. They occupy lanes as though the rest of us have nowhere to be. They do not think. They do not observe. They do not show consideration.”

“All of which may be true,” said Tim.

“It is true.”

“Yes,” said Tim, “but supposing it is. Supposing every word of it is true. Supposing they are inattentive, self-absorbed, exasperating and wrong. What then?”

Perry gave a small snort, as if the answer were self-evident. “Then they ought to be corrected.”

“And how is that going for you?”

This, too, landed.

The Rolls continued its thunderous progress down the bypass, though now at a speed less likely to lead to newspaper coverage.

Perry frowned thoughtfully. “Not especially well.”

“Exactly,” said Tim. “Your difficulty is that you want to change the way everyone else drives. I understand the instinct. I really do. I frequently want to change the way other people do things. I should like Judith to be more flexible with forms. I should like Horse to be rather less emotionally invested in short grass. I should like Dobbs to use slightly less than a bottle of Brasso every week without behaving as though the sanctuary has been abandoned to barbarism.”

Sandy let out a small involuntary laugh.

Sally loosened her grip on the leather strap.

Tim continued. “But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years in this job, it’s that I have absolutely no power to change another human being.”

Perry glanced at him.

“None?”

“Practically none. You can encourage. You can plead. You can pray. You can suggest, model, invite, teach, nag, reason, and in moments of weakness produce a colour-coded memo. But in the end other people remain magnificently themselves. They go on being who they are with a stubbornness that would be admirable if it weren’t so tiring.”

“That,” said Sally from the back, “is the truest thing you’ve said all week.”

Tim nodded. “What I have learned, after much passion and anger and frustration, is that the only thing about other people that I can change is my reaction to their behaviour. If I let what they do fill me with fury, then I am the one who has to live with the fury while they carry on, cheerful and oblivious. I become the residence of the thing I resent.”

There was a quiet in the car now that had not been there before. Not the fearful silence of imminent death, but the more searching kind that comes when a truth has entered the room and is taking off its coat.

Tim went on, more gently. “In fact, I’d go further. The only person I’m actually capable of changing is me.”

Perry said nothing.

Ahead of them, a slow-moving estate car pulled into the lane. In the old order of things, this would have triggered lights, horn, judgement, and perhaps the collapse of western civilisation.

Instead Perry drew a measured breath.

He did not accelerate.

He did not hoot.

He remained, to the amazement of all present, at a decent distance.

“Remarkable,” murmured Sandy. “A miracle on the bypass.”

Perry gave her a look, but a faint one.

After a while he said, “It is infuriating, though.”

“Oh yes,” said Tim. “That doesn’t go away. Holiness is not the inability to be annoyed. It is what you do next.”

Sally, who had now regained sufficient colour to resemble a living churchwarden rather than a funerary waxwork, said, “I’d settle for getting there alive.”

“We shall certainly do that,” said Perry, with dignity.

Then, after a pause: “I may have been a little close to that Nissan.”

“A little?” said Sandy.

“Yes, well.” Perry cleared his throat. “One is not always at one’s best in traffic.”

Tim smiled. “Nor in synods, nor deanery planning evenings, nor annual meetings, nor when someone suggests replacing the organ voluntary with a projection screen and a backing track. The principle remains the same.”

“And that,” said Sally, “is presumably what the diocesan strategy meeting will fail to understand.”

Tim looked out of the window as the diocesan offices came at last into sight, squat and worthy among municipal shrubbery.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite possibly. Because institutions always imagine that change happens by issuing instructions to other people. But the deepest changes usually begin when someone alters the only thing they truly can alter—their own heart, their own habits, their own response.”

Perry brought the Rolls into the car park with sudden, ceremonial gentleness, as though no violence had ever occurred within fifty yards of the vehicle. He parked neatly between two modest hatchbacks and switched off the engine.

For a moment nobody moved.

Then Sally said, “Thank you, Perry. A memorable journey.”

“Indeed,” said Sandy. “In several senses.”

Perry turned in his seat and looked at them all with the composed gravity of a man determined to reclaim his natural identity from recent events.

“I shall,” he said, “make an effort on the return journey to be less… reactive.”

Tim put a hand briefly on his arm. “That’s all any of us can do.”

They got out into the diocesan car park, smoothing coats and gathering papers, and stood for a moment beside the great silent Rolls-Royce.

Ahead of them lay several hours of strategic language, missionary aspiration, and probably a handout entitled something like Flourishing Together into Tomorrow.

Behind them lay the bypass, which had already delivered its own more useful lesson.

Mission, Tim thought, did indeed come from the bottom up. Not from glossy paper, nor from diocesan fiat, nor from the agitated conviction that everybody else ought to improve immediately. It began in the difficult, humbling recognition that while one could not command the souls of others, one could at least submit one’s own temper to grace.

And that, he reflected, walking towards the entrance with Perry now holding the door open for the others as though he had not recently attempted to overtake half of Hampshire, was probably strategy enough for one day.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of ‘The Parish Life’ and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe .

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

This was at the end of rehearsal, after a particularly bruising encounter with a modern item which Dennis Ackland assured everyone was pretty close to a Huw Thomas arrangement. Lionel had accompanied it with obvious hatred, and the tenors had sung it as though the notes were an optional idea rather than a printed instruction. The piece itself had not been a success. More accurately, it had been several different failures happening simultaneously. The basses had entered late, the second tenors had entered early, Abe Appleford had settled with some confidence upon a note not obviously related to the others, and Alan Dobbs had reached the bridge still under the impression that they were singing the second verse.

“Thomas and his crew would have made a better fist of it,” said Dennis darkly, tapping the music with the end of his pencil as if it had personally offended him. “They at least understand that consonants are not decorative.”

There was a silence at this, because all present knew whom he meant. Huw Thomas and the annoying Solent Male Voice Choir. Huw Thomas, arranger, conductor, possessor of a working sense of rhythm and several pieces of music which SMVC guarded, in the minds of Havnot Male Voice Choir, with the jealous secrecy of the nuclear codes.

It was Horse who spoke next, leaning back in his chair with the broad look of a man whose thoughts arrived slowly but with conviction.

“Well,” he said, “there’s one obvious answer.”

No one should ever feel comforted by a sentence which Horse begins in that manner.

Leslie, who did not, removed his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “I should like it noted,” he said, “before we proceed, that there may in fact be several answers, and that Horse’s obvious answer may not be among the more lawful.”

“Lawful?” said Dobbs. “Who said anything about lawful? We’re talking about music.”

That, in a way, was the beginning.

The plan, if so ill-disciplined a thing may be granted so dignified a noun, did not emerge all at once. It took shape over two Tuesday nights and one longer session in the Little John, fuelled by pints, grievance, and the peculiar masculine conviction that a bad idea becomes practical if enough people nod at it gravely. Dennis had said, not altogether metaphorically, that if he could just get Huw Thomas in a room for twenty minutes he could probably sort the whole thing out. Dennis had meant, by this, a musical discussion. Horse, Dobbs, and Abe, all men with an uneven relationship to nuance, took him at what they believed to be his deeper meaning.

“We’re not abducting him,” Kevin Keen said, very firmly, when he realised what was being proposed.

“No,” said Horse. “Course not.”

“We’re inviting him for a conversation,” said Abe, with the tone of a man repairing a lawnmower.

“A very firm conversation,” said Dobbs.

Kevin closed his eyes briefly. “That is still worryingly close to abducting him.”

“No one’s tying him up,” said Horse, offended.

“No one said anything about a cellar,” said Abe.

That somebody could say the words ‘no one said anything about a cellar’ and not hear the alarm in them remains one of the minor tragedies of English male fellowship.

The chosen occasion was a Saturday evening concert at St Faith’s, where Solent Male Voice Choir were appearing with a visiting ladies’ choir and a youth ensemble so efficient that HMVC resented them on sight. Horse, Dobbs and Abe attended under the thinnest conceivable cover, which was that they were music lovers. No one who had seen Dobbs during the second half of any choral concert would have mistaken him for a music lover. He sat like a man enduring dental work on behalf of the nation.

Still, Huw Thomas was there, and that was what mattered. He conducted the second half with the infuriating ease of one who knew precisely what he was doing. The men came in when he asked them to, stopped when he wanted them to, and produced, on at least three occasions, the sort of clean, ringing chord that causes lesser choirs to stare with mingled awe and seething resentment. Horse muttered “showing off” under his breath at the end of Hey Jude, though not quite convincingly.

Afterwards, in the church hall, while people drank indifferent coffee from plastic cups and said “marvellous” to one another, the three men made their approach.

Huw Thomas, who was shorter than Horse had expected and much more self-possessed, turned towards them with the relaxed expression of a man accustomed to post-concert peculiarities.

“Mr Thomas,” said Dobbs, drawing himself up. “A word, if you please.”

Huw looked at him. Then at Horse. Then at Abe, who had the fixed, practical face of a man collecting a gate hinge from the hardware store.

“Yes?” he said pleasantly.

Horse cleared his throat. “We wondered,” he said, “if you’d care for a quiet pint to discuss some arrangements.”

There are invitations which pass unnoticed into the social order of life, and invitations which ring like a dustbin lid dropped in a monastery. This was the second kind. Yet Huw Thomas, to his credit, did not laugh. He merely regarded them for a moment with an expression in which curiosity and pity had entered into a longstanding partnership.

“A quiet pint,” he repeated.

“That’s right,” said Abe.

“Regarding arrangements.”

“That’s right.”

“Yours, specifically.”

Horse attempted what he believed to be a reassuring smile. It had roughly the effect of a farm gate swinging in high wind.

“Well then,” said Huw. “It would be rude not to hear you out.”

An agreement was made to meet at Monday night in The Little John (because Horse’s shed was judged too expensive to heat). After acquiring pints from Clarence, Huw Thomas, being unfamiliar with the Little John’s architecture, was easily persuaded down some steep steps to the cellar. This was a dank room which Horse had once helped clear of barrels and which Abe declared was “private enough for a talk.” It had a stool, a crate, and a hanging bulb which made everyone look interrogated. Huw Thomas was invited to sit on the stool. He did so with the composure of a magistrate visiting a disappointing village.

Then, for the first time, the plan encountered its central weakness, which was that no one present had thought beyond getting him there.

Dobbs stood with his hands behind his back. Abe examined a shelf. Horse coughed. Huw sat on the stool and waited.

“Well?” he said after a moment.

Horse looked at Abe. Abe looked at Dobbs. Dobbs, who hated improvisation in all things except rules, said, “You know very well why you’re here.”

Huw tilted his head. “Do I?”

“For the arrangements,” said Horse.

“What about them?”

“The copies.”

“What copies?”

“The ones you’ve got.”

“Yes,” said Huw, patting his music case. “I do have them.”

There followed a silence of the kind usually found after a badly judged hymn choice.

Huw looked slowly round at the three of them. “Are you trying,” he said at last, with great delicacy, “to steal my music?”

“No!” said Horse, scandalised. “Borrow it.”

“Without my permission,” said Huw.

There was another pause.

“When you put it like that,” muttered Abe.

What happened next was, in its way, a masterclass. Huw Thomas, being Welsh and therefore long acquainted with the strange seriousness of male choirs, did not raise his voice, threaten the police, or attempt escape. He simply accepted the essential absurdity of the situation and began, with quiet efficiency, to take charge of it.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s begin sensibly. You cannot sing the arrangements you covet.”

“We can,” said Dobbs, though without much force.

“You cannot. I heard you in Fareham last Lent. Most of your second tenors were half a beat behind the only one who knew the tune, and one of your basses was treating pianissimo as an optional instruction meant only for lesser men.”

Dobbs flushed. “That was a difficult acoustic.”

“That,” said Huw, “was a church hall.”

Horse shifted uneasily.

Huw folded his hands. “So the question is not whether I give you the arrangements. The question is why you think the arrangements are the answer. Most choirs do not need better music. They need to have at least a passing acquaintance with tunes, and better vowels.”

This landed on them with the baffling offence of medical advice.

“We’ve got vowels,” said Abe.

“You have several,” said Huw. “Not all at the same time, which is the difficulty.”

Through the hatch at the top of the cellar steps appeared, after some minutes, the anxious face of Kevin Keen, who had followed the thing as far as he could in the hope of preventing a felony and was now discovering that events had moved beyond ordinary categories.

“What,” he asked, staring down, “is going on?”

Horse looked up. “We’re having a discussion.”

Kevin stared at Huw Thomas, who lifted a hand politely.

“Evening,” said Huw. “Could someone bring me another pint? These men are not going home until they’ve learned the bridge.”

“The bridge of what?” said Kevin.

“Mr Blue Sky,” said Huw.

Kevin looked heavenward for strength not obviously available.

By half past ten the situation had developed in a manner none of the conspirators had anticipated. Dobbs, Abe, and Horse stood in a line beneath the cellar hatch, scores balanced on an empty beer keg, while Huw Thomas, still seated on the stool like a patient schoolmaster in captivity, made them sing the middle section of an ELO arrangement in four parts. Kevin had been pressed into service. Leslie, having been fetched because “someone had to hold the thing together,” had arrived in a raincoat and entered the scene with the expression of a man discovering that civilisation has collapsed during the interval.

“Again,” said Huw calmly. “And this time on ‘sky’, do not spread it into three counties. It’s one vowel, not a parish boundary dispute.”

They sang again.

“No, no, no,” said Huw. “Horse, you’re swallowing the line before it reaches the back teeth. Mr Griffin, better. Dobbs, you’re late, but magnificently confident. Mr Appleford, I admire your instinct, but the note remains incorrect.”

Abe considered this. “Near it, though.”

“In a spiritual sense,” said Huw.

At some point Lionel Hargreaves appeared at the top of the steps, having heard rumours in the pub of “some sort of illicit sectional rehearsal involving the Welshman,” and had to be physically prevented from coming down and correcting the harmony himself. He remained above, deeply agitated, making occasional observations about misplaced breath marks and once shouting, “That is not how light should be voiced!” into the darkness like a distraught ghost of the conservatoire.

When Dennis found out, it was because Kevin, exhausted by the stress of the previous evening, saw him the next morning on the way to work at the school.

Dennis stood very still through the entire explanation. His face changed colour twice. When Kevin had finished, Dennis removed his glasses, cleaned them, and replaced them.

“Let me be sure I understand this,” he said. “Horse, Dobbs, and Appleford lured Huw Thomas to a cellar in order to extort arrangements from him.”

Kevin nodded miserably.

“But failed.”

“Yes.”

“And instead spent two hours being coached through the bridge of an ELO number.”

“Yes.”

Dennis inhaled through his nose with the controlled force of a man drawing air through damaged plaster.

“And how,” he asked, “was the phrasing?”

Kevin hesitated. “Not… ideal.”

Dennis shut his eyes.

When the full story reached the choir on Tuesday, reactions were mixed. Leslie declared it a disgrace and asked that minutes should be drafted to reflect his prior objections. Dobbs maintained that, until the matter was made melodramatic by others, it had been no more than an unauthorised musical consultation. Abe said he had learned quite a lot, actually, about the shape of ‘sky’. Horse admitted that Huw Thomas had been “very fair about it, considering.”

“And did he give you the arrangements?” asked Dennis.

“No,” said Horse.

“Did he promise future assistance?”

“No.”

“Did he at any point seem intimidated?”

There was a pause.

“Not in the strict sense,” said Dobbs.

Dennis looked at them one by one. “So you committed a criminally incompetent act of musical desperation, failed in your objective, humiliated this choir, strengthened the enemy, and still managed to sing the bridge with slack phrasing.”

“It weren’t slack by the end,” said Horse.

Dennis turned on him with the terrible calm that only true musical offence can produce.

“Mr Palmer, if you are ever going to abduct a conductor, the least you could do is take him somewhere with a photo-copier.”

And that, more or less, was the end of the matter. No charges were brought, largely because Huw Thomas, when later asked by an amused colleague whether he had really been kidnapped by Havnot Male Voice Choir, replied that kidnapped was far too dramatic a word.

“I was borrowed,” he said. “Badly.”

He did, however, send Dennis a note the following week, containing no arrangement, no concession, and thankfully no solicitor’s letter. It read only:

Your men have heart.

Pity about the vowels.

If attempting ELO again, less weight on ‘Mr’ and more line into ‘Blue’.

Also, lock the hatch properly.

Anyone could have escaped.

Dennis read this in silence, folded it once, and placed it in his pocket.

Then he looked up at the assembled choir and rapped the music stand with his pencil.

“Right,” he said. “From letter C. And this time, gentlemen, let us try to commit fewer crimes against music than we did against the law.”

“Where is letter C, again?” asked Dobbs.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of ‘The Parish Life’ and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe .

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

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A rehearsal review by the Revd Dr Timothy Keen, Vicar of St Faithful’s, Havnot.

There are institutions in parish life which nobody now questions because they appear to have preceded history itself. They are simply there. They have always been there. They will, one suspects, still be there when the rest of us have been taken into glory, or at least into a diocesan reorganisation. The Havnot Male Voice Choir is one such institution.

I do not know when it began. Frankly, nobody does. Horse says it started after some local men heard a Welsh choir sing on holiday and came home convinced that the thing could be replicated with sufficient patriotism and a pint. Lionel says the founding impulse was noble but musically under-informed. Dennis, the conductor, says very little about the matter, but once remarked that it had been “an avoidable mistake, prolonged by habit.”

At any rate, for longer than most of us can remember, on Tuesday evenings during term time and often beyond it, the church hall has filled with men carrying black folders, folded spectacles, cough sweets, old loyalties, and the sort of determination not usually found outside small regiments and parish fêtes. They arrive slowly. They remove coats as though preparing for heavy industry. They greet one another with the peculiar understated warmth of Englishmen who would rather be thought dependable than affectionate. Chairs are moved. More chairs are moved because the first arrangement was wrong. Music is unpacked. Somebody asks whether we are doing the second verse. Somebody else says we never did the second verse properly even in 2009. There is a smell of instant coffee, old carpet, and purpose.

I have long thought that the parish ought to know more about this body, partly because it is one of those things of which a church ought to be proud, and partly because many parishioners are only dimly aware that behind the hall doors, every Tuesday, a stubborn act of male singing takes place with all the gravity of a constitutional assembly and all the practical efficiency of a wheelbarrow with one loose handle.

I went along last week, therefore, in my capacity as vicar, Honorary President, and occasional witness to the many strange ecosystems that flourish under church roofs.

Dennis Ackland was already there, standing at the front in the posture of a man who has spent enough of his life trying to make other people come in at the right time to have abandoned all romantic views of human nature. Dennis is the conductor, though he would not care for the word. “I merely attempt control,” he told me once. He has the dry, formidable air of a retired schoolmaster, or perhaps a colonel fallen on musically disappointing times. He can hear everything. This is both his gift and his burden. A choir such as HMVC offers much to hear. Not all of it pleasant.

At the piano sat Lionel Hargreaves, our own organist, who calls himself ‘accompanist by entrapment’. He had apparently agreed to help the choir out for a few weeks after the previous accompanist died at a concert during a particularly committed rendition of Bridge over Troubled Water. Lionel had now been there for over twenty years, which is the sort of thing that happens in parish life when one fails to leave quickly enough after making oneself useful. Lionel has never entirely accepted the repertoire, which he regards as a long campaign of resistance against civilisation. The men, in return, regard most of Lionel’s preferred music as suspiciously lacking in tunes one could hum in a pub car park. This tension has not destroyed them. It may in fact be what keeps them alive.

The members straggled in. Horse arrived with Kevin Keen, which surprised nobody, because where one of them is the other is generally within audible range. Horse carries himself with the calm solidity of a man to whom most things in life are either liftable, mendable, or at least discussable with a spanner. He is a bass, and sings as if bass singing were essentially a matter of moving a heavy object from one side of a field to another. Kevin, by contrast, has a little more musical instinct and a great deal more social foresight. It is one of the quiet pleasures of watching them together that Kevin can silence Horse with a glance of such practised economy that no married couple could improve upon it.

Abe Appleford came in behind them, cap still in hand, looking like a man who had been fetched halfway through something more practical. Abe possesses one of the lighter voices in the room, to the continual astonishment of anyone meeting him for the first time. He sings with conviction, warmth, and an intriguing relationship to pitch which is not always shared by the rest of his section. Alan Dobbs followed, carrying music in a manner that suggested he did not trust it and expected it to have altered itself since last week. Dobbs’s relationship with printed copies is haunted by a conviction that they used to make better ones. Leslie Griffin was already seated, pencil in hand, breaths marked, pages ordered, clearly prepared for serious work and therefore mildly offensive to the ethos of the evening.

There were others too: a retired naval bass who seemed to sing every phrase like a weather advisory; a tenor whose understanding of concerts was partly musical and partly social display; a shy widower who barely spoke but whose voice, when it emerged, seemed to come from somewhere far deeper than the church hall. There are one or two men who, I gathered, remain on the books in a state of honoured theoretical membership despite not having been seen since the coalition government.

The rehearsal began, as such things do, not with singing but with the attempt to establish where in the copies the singing might most plausibly begin. There followed a quarter of an hour in which copies were distributed to those who missed the last three rehearsals, pages were turned, wrong numbers announced, and one folder was discovered to still contain the Christmas programme. Dobbs maintained with moral force that the basses had been given an inferior edition. Dennis stood through this with a patience that should, in a just society, earn him some kind of civic medal.

At length they launched into Men of Harlech. Or rather, several of them launched into Men of Harlech, while others entered in a related but distinct zone of the bar. Dennis stopped them after eight bars.

“No,” he said. “That was not a beginning. That was a collapse remembered in sound.”

They began again.

Now, it must be said, when HMVC is untidy, it is very untidy. Entrances wander. Consonants arrive without coordination. The tenors sometimes appear to be reading a different emotional script from the basses. Lionel, meanwhile, plays with all the weary distinction of a man accompanying a noble ruin. And yet. And yet. There are moments, and they came several times that evening, when the whole thing suddenly aligns. The parts lock. The room fills. A phrase lands with proper weight. For a moment, once hears what they are aiming at: fellowship turned into sound; ordinary men lending their lungs to something larger than their individual confidence. It is unexpectedly moving, partly because it is so hard won.

Dennis, naturally, refuses to sentimentalise any of this.

“Basses, you are not digging a trench,” he said at one point.

Then, to the tenors: “This is not light opera. Nobody here is dying beautifully on a balcony.”

Then, after one especially uncertain passage from the baritones: “If you are going to come in wrongly, at least do me the courtesy of doing it together.”

The choir collapsed laughing, including the culprits. Dennis did not smile, which only made it worse.

Lionel attempted, during a break, to interest them in an item of greater refinement which he had, I suspect, brought along in hope rather than expectation. “Ave Verum Corpus Natum...,” he explained, “could sound wonderful sung by men’s voices alone”. The men in question heard him out with the grave courtesy men reserve for a proposal they have no intention whatever of adopting. Horse asked whether it had “a proper tune.” Lionel replied that it had harmonic integrity, which in HMVC is not the same thing at all. Abe said he liked things people could come out humming. Leslie, who had clearly looked at the score online, began to say something helpful about phrasing, but was overrun by a general preference for a medley they had once sung successfully in Gosport. Lionel closed the folder in the manner of a man digging culture’s grave with his bare hands.

It was somewhere during the second half that the matter of Solent Male Voice Choir arose, as I had been assured sooner or later it would. One does not need to mention Solent often. Solent is always there, hovering over HMVC conversation like Rome over the Anglican Church.

For those outside the male voice world, the Solent choir, meeting just down the road at St Faith’s, is larger, slicker, better attended, more modern in repertoire, and led by a conductor called Huw Thomas, whose gifts are spoken of in HMVC with the complex tone one usually hears in relation to wealthier cousins. Solent, it seems, can fill a stage. Solent can manage close harmony without visible suffering. Solent possesses, most galling of all, arrangements written by its own musical director. This fact alone has produced enough envy in HMVC to heat the church hall for a fortnight.

Nobody admitted to envy, of course. That would have been vulgar. Instead the rivalry emerged through principle.

“I’m not saying they’re flashy,” said one of the baritones, in the tone of a man very much saying they are flashy, “but there’s a lot of performance in it.”

Dennis gave a short grunt, which might have meant many things.

Lionel, who is incapable of leaving any subject un-improved, observed that Solent at least attempted to vary their volume.

“Yes, well,” said Dobbs, “some of us are not here to be theatrical.”

Kevin murmured, “No danger of that,” and Horse had to bite the inside of his own cheek.

Abe said he had heard Solent once and thought them “very tidy.” This was received as a nearly treasonable remark, softened only by his adding that they lacked “a bit of proper weight underneath.”

Dennis then said, after a pause long enough to deserve respect, “Thomas gets them to watch their conductor.”

This, I gathered, was the nearest thing to praise yet uttered in the history of the conflict.

No one spoke for a moment. Then Lionel said, “Well, yes,” in a voice that managed agreement and pain at once.

And there, really, was the whole thing. HMVC resents Solent, admires Solent, studies Solent, disapproves of Solent, and defines itself against Solent with an energy that might, under better strategic leadership, be used for recruitment. The rivalry is one of those local mythologies by which small institutions keep themselves alive. Empires need enemies. So do choirs of fifteen men and one accompanist who never meant to stay.

They finished, eventually, with Gwahoddiad, which the men approached with a seriousness bordering on reverence. Here even the banter thinned. Even the shuffling quietened. Something about the piece, or perhaps about what they believe the piece asks of them, brought out their best. It felt heartfelt, weighty, honest. The shy widower sang. Horse found the line and held it. Abe, for once, came in so nearly where everybody else was that Dennis let the passage continue without comment. Leslie glowed with the joy of preparedness rewarded. Lionel gave them everything he had. For a minute or two the church hall ceased to be a church hall and became what all rehearsal rooms dream of being: a place where the thing being attempted actually arrives. At least for a few bars.

Then Dennis dropped his hands and said, “Better. Not good, but better.”

This was accepted as triumph.

Afterwards, as inevitably as the final chord, they made for the Little John. I accompanied them for one pint, purely in the interests of pastoral observation. It seemed important to see the choir in its natural post-rehearsal habitat. Here the analysis continued with great seriousness. Notes were discussed. Programmes were proposed. A future concert line-up was described as potentially “very strong” on the basis that four men had not said no. Solent came up again, this time in relation to ticket sales, stagecraft, and what Dennis called “their tendency to over-enjoy themselves.” Horse ordered crisps enough for a minor synod. Kevin kept a quiet eye on him. Lionel looked as though he disapproved of the lager but had resigned himself to the company. Dobbs was still not on the right page, though the music had long since been packed away.

I sat among them and found myself absurdly fond.

For here, in truth, is something worth admiring. Havnot Male Voice Choir is not glossy. It doesn’t exist in a world with branding and coordinated folders and a mailing list managed by somebody under sixty. It is something older and more stubborn than that. It’s a group of men, some churchgoers and some not, some musical and some merely willing, gathering week by week because they believe that singing together is still worth the trouble. They carry tradition like a slightly battered working object. They grumble. They compare themselves unfavourably and favourably to others in alternating sequence. They resist change until change becomes unavoidable and then claim it was their idea. They sing, badly at moments, beautifully at others, and then they go to the pub and keep one another company.

In an age that struggles to make men do anything together without screens, irony, or commercial sponsorship, I am not sure we should be too sniffy about a choir that survives on repetition, wounded pride, loyalty, and Tuesday ale.

So let the parish be informed. The Havnot Male Voice Choir still lives. It still rehearses in our hall. It still believes, against evidence but with admirable persistence, that one more run-through may yet bring civilisation within reach. Long may it continue. Though whether the Little John must continue to benefit quite so directly from the second basses is, perhaps, a matter for future pastoral reflection. If you are a man, and you can carry a tune in a bucket, there will be a place for you in the ranks of the Havnot Male Voice Choir. Don’t, for goodness sake, go down the road and join the Solent choir. They will undoubtedly improve you.

And no-one wants that.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of ‘The Parish Life’ and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe .

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

By Duncan Hardpass

Team Leader, St Faithful’s Tech Team

There are moments in the life of a parish when one becomes aware that history is being made.

Not the obvious sort of history, such as the replacement of a bishop, the dedication of a new altar frontal, or the regrettable incident in 2019 when the Palm Sunday donkey entered the West Door at speed and had to be distracted with Rich Tea. I refer, rather, to those quieter revolutions by which an institution long accustomed to doing things in one way suddenly finds itself standing on the brink of transformation.

Such a moment occurred last week at St Faithful’s, Havnot, when, after years of administrative discussion, practical hesitation, contradictory quotations, two faculty-related misunderstandings, and one memorable exchange in which Alan Dobbs asked whether the internet was “strictly necessary for salvation”, the church building was at last connected to WiFi.

I do not mind admitting that I experienced, for a few minutes, what can only be described as professional euphoria.

For years, those of us tasked with supporting the digital life of the parish have had to operate under conditions more usually associated with polar expeditions and military exile. To upload anything from inside the building required either a prayer, a window ledge in the south aisle, or one’s phone held aloft near the pulpit like Moses appealing for signal from the heavens. Livestreaming was less a ministry than an exercise in apologetics. One did not so much transmit worship as issue periodic visual rumours of it.

And now, all at once, the possibilities had changed.

I could see it immediately. Seamless projection. Responsive audio control. Instant access to service plans, rotas, cloud-based storage, liturgical resources, safeguarding documentation, and the church’s online giving platform. We would no longer be a parish merely making do in the digital age. We would become, if I may use the term, a connected worship environment.

Rev Dr Tim Keen, to his credit, responded to my initial presentation with what I would call guarded enthusiasm. He said, “Very good, Duncan. As long as nobody gets too excited.” This, naturally, was far too late.

By Tuesday evening I had drafted what I entitled The Smart Church Initiative, a phased programme designed to bring St Faithful’s into a new era of integrated ecclesial functionality. The first stage was modest. I proposed that selected systems in church should communicate intelligently with one another, thus reducing manual burden and improving the worship experience.

In essence: the heating, lighting, projection, and livestream setup would all become more responsive, more coordinated, and, where possible, remotely manageable from a single device. Namely, my device.

I explained this to Judith Crowther in the office.

She looked at me for several seconds with the expression of a woman who has already lived through too many pilot schemes and said, “What exactly is wrong with a switch?”

I replied that nothing was wrong with a switch in itself, but that the future lay in integration.

She said, “The future can jolly well remember to turn the vestry radiator off after choir practice, then.”

There is in every parish a category of person who hears the phrase “smart technology” and assumes one is proposing the replacement of Christianity with a Scandinavian airport lounge. Alan Dobbs, our verger, entered that category at once. He did not approve of the WiFi in principle, having already asked whether signals could interfere with the sanctity of the sanctuary. When I mentioned that lighting scenes might now be pre-programmed according to liturgical mood, he froze where he stood and said, very distinctly, “The mood is Matins.”

This was not, in fairness, an implementation-ready response.

Horse Palmer, by contrast, welcomed the entire development on the grounds that “if the church is clever now, that saves the rest of us a job.” Unfortunately, Horse then interpreted “smart devices” as meaning devices capable of basic conversation, and spent much of Wednesday saying “Good morning” to the smart speaker in the coffee area and becoming increasingly affronted when it failed to answer in a West Sussex accent.

The first full test of the new system took place on Thursday morning before the 10.30 service.

I arrived early with my tablet, two charging cables, a sense of vocation, and what in retrospect may have been excessive confidence. The WiFi was excellent. Everything connected beautifully. The church heating responded. The projector came on at once. The sound desk synchronised. Even the livestream platform opened without the usual prolonged buffering during which one has time to reflect on mortality.

For perhaps four minutes, I stood in the nave convinced that we had crossed some threshold from bumbling parish competence into something almost cathedral-adjacent.

Then the font lights activated themselves.

Not gradually. Not gently. Activated.

A ring of illumination sprang up around the font with such suddenness that Mrs Rivers, who had come in to arrange flowers, actually stepped back and said, “Good Lord,” in a tone suggesting that for one brief instant she suspected this might be true in a much more immediate way than expected.

I attempted to deactivate the lights using the control panel. Instead, the nave lights dimmed to what I had labelled “Reflective Evening Prayer”. This would have been appropriate had it not been 9.47 in the morning and bright sunshine outside. I corrected this, but only by causing the screen to lower itself halfway over the war memorial.

At that precise moment Lionel Hargreaves entered, observed the lighting state, the descending screen, and the glowing font, and said, with grim resignation, “At last. A visual theology of sacramental transcendence.”

By the time the congregation began to arrive, matters had not improved. The heating in the north aisle had become tropical, while the choir vestry remained climatologically suitable for root vegetables. The service slides were visible, but only on a delay which meant that the responses appeared a full two or three lines after they were needed. This produced, during the opening greeting, a murmur of liturgical uncertainty usually associated with weddings. And baptisms. And funerals, actually.

“The Lord be with you”

“Mumm, bumble, err..what?”

“It’s on the bottom of page 2. Look, where I’m pointing with my finger. Let’s try again: the Lord be with you”

(Low uncertain mumbling)

“One more time. You’ve nearly got it. The Lord be with you”

“And also with you.”

“Great! Now, keep an eye on the service sheet from here on. There are plenty of places where you get to do the speaking.”

Judith, standing at the back with the notices, asked me in a low voice whether the screen was supposed to be showing the harvest appeal.

I looked up.

It was indeed showing the harvest appeal, despite the fact that this was a midweek Eucharist in Eastertide and the slide in question had not been used for months. I advanced the presentation. It moved not to the hymn, but to a page reminding volunteers to label soup donations clearly in the event of dairy content.

“Duncan,” said Judith, “why is the WiFi now giving dietary advice?”

I should say here that all of these setbacks were manageable in themselves. Any one of them, taken in isolation, would have been a routine snag in the bedding-in of a new system. The problem was that they began, quite quickly, to interact.

The delayed slides caused people to speak late. The livestream microphone, compensating automatically for background sound, amplified the late congregational responses with a kind of haunted solemnity. The smart lighting, evidently detecting movement, brightened and dimmed according to who was passing through which aisle. During the Gospel, the lectern was splendidly illuminated while the reader remained in comparative dusk, producing the effect of a scripture reading performed in conversation with a minor supernatural event.

Rev Tim, to his enormous credit, kept going.

There are clergy who, faced with technological disturbances during worship, radiate panic so palpably that the congregation begins to feel they are all trapped in one of those plays that go wrong. Tim is not one of them. He has the rare gift of continuing as though whatever is happening is either intentional or, at the very least, beneath the dignity of public acknowledgement.

So when the intercessions were accompanied by the sudden appearance of the slide WELCOME TO ST FAITHFUL’S CHURCH BBQ TEAM MEETING, he merely paused, looked at it for half a second, and said, “We pray also for all those called to serve in ways expected and unexpected.”

This was well received.

The real setback came after the Peace.

At some point during the exchange of signs of reconciliation, Horse leant against what he later described as “a little white box what seemed to be doing nothing.” This turned out to be the manual override for the integrated system. The result was immediate and, in systems terms, regrettable.

The projector switched off. The south aisle lights came fully on. The chancel lights went out. The urn in the servery, which I had not even realised was on the network, began heating itself up with a noise like a fighter jet attempting flight in a force 10 gale.

There followed a silence in which every person present became aware, at exactly the same moment, that the church had become more complicated than was spiritually helpful.

After the service, several people were kind.

Mrs Rivers said that these things took time and that in flower arranging one often had to take two stems out before the whole thing sat properly. Lionel maintained that the temporary darkness around the altar had been “unexpectedly numinous,” which I took to be favourable. Horse said that if I wanted, he could probably sort the whole system out with a ladder and a hammer.

Alan Dobbs merely looked around the building, now humming faintly with invisible connectivity, and said, “This is what comes of treating a parish church like an Apple store.”

That was hurtful, though not wholly without diagnostic value.

I have since revised the Smart Church Initiative. It remains, I am convinced, a worthwhile vision. The presence of WiFi in church is not a threat but an opportunity. It can support worship, mission, communication, and access. It can help us reach people beyond the building. It can reduce confusion, improve coordination, and strengthen the digital life of the parish.

But I now recognise that one must proceed with humility.

Not every switch desires, in the depths of its being, to be integrated. Not every light needs a mood. Not every item in a church benefits from being attached to an app. There is wisdom, perhaps, in the older ways. A radiator that simply radiates. A screen that descends only when invited. A font that does not unexpectedly achieve enlightenment before breakfast.

For the present, therefore, the system has been scaled back. The WiFi remains. The livestream is improved. The notices can now be uploaded from inside the building without anyone climbing onto furniture. These are, I think, real gains.

As for the larger vision, I have not abandoned it.

I have simply accepted that digital transformation in a parish setting must move at the speed of the parish, which is to say: prayerfully, unevenly, and with at least one person in the room asking whether any of it is strictly necessary.

Still, the future has arrived at St Faithful’s.

Judith has asked me not to let it arrive again unsupervised.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

The AUDIO BOOK of The Crack in the Wall (our first novel) is now available at https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of ‘The Parish Life’ and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, with 10% off this week. For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe .

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

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There are, from time to time, developments in parish life which nobody entirely expected.

For example: it is now apparently possible to hear The Crack in the Wall without turning a single page.

“Yes, but what sort of hearing?” asked Mr Lionel P. Hargreaves, D.Mus., with immediate suspicion. “Do you mean hearing in the proper sense, as one hears Stanford, or hearing in the degraded modern sense, where one is buttering toast while a device recites literature at one?”

“Audiobook,” said Judith, with the clipped weariness of a woman who had already explained this to three PCC members and one bewildered donor.

“A book,” said Horse, “but through your ears.”

“That is, regrettably, the gist of it,” said Judith.

And so we are able to confirm that The Crack in the Wall, the first St Faithful’s novel, is now available on Audible, read by Canon Tom himself.

Which means that the story of St Faithful’s, St Paddy’s, ecclesiastical ambition, parish bewilderment, spiritual longing, and the general mystery of what on earth the Church is doing can now accompany you while driving, walking, cooking, gardening, hiding from the world, or pretending to do one thing while actually listening to something much more interesting.

Mrs Crowther has asked me to stress that this is not “an advertisement” in the vulgar sense, but “useful information for those who may wish to receive narrative content in a more portable format.”

Lionel, meanwhile, wishes it to be known that being read aloud gives a novel “a certain almost liturgical dignity,” though he adds that he has not yet ruled on the theological propriety of chapter five.

Perry has said that listening to a novel is exactly the sort of thing one ought to do in a leather chair with a serious expression.

Horse asked whether this means you can “get to the emotional bits while mending a gate.”

Yes. That is exactly what it means.

So, if you have read The Crack in the Wall and fancy hearing it afresh, or if you have been meaning to begin but felt defeated by the relentless need to use your eyes, here it is in audible form at last:

https://tinyurl.com/msrarhun

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar (including all 5 volumes of ‘The Parish Life’ and our first novel) are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online, currently with 10% off.

For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe. St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant. AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE PARISH BEEHIVES
It began, as many dangerous things do in parish life, with an idea that sounded excellent in a meeting.

Sandy, in one of her more hopeful moods, suggested that St Faithful’s might keep bees in the wilder part of the churchyard. It would be, she said, a symbol of care for creation. There was a little pause after this, during which everybody present silently admired the phrase. Care for creation. It had the sort of ring to it that made disagreement sound almost immoral. One could hardly bang a fist on the table and demand indifference to pollinators.

So the PCC, in a moment of what later proved to be collective overconfidence, agreed.

The first difficulty was that nobody involved knew anything whatsoever about bees.

This did not, of course, prevent the formation of a sub-committee. In fact, it positively encouraged it. There is nothing the Church of England likes more than approaching a subject of total ignorance by appointing four people to discuss it over several months.

Perry Wainwright took a leading role at once, largely because he felt that anything involving the countryside was naturally his department. He arrived at the first planning session wearing a waxed jacket, stout boots, and his deer-stalker hat which might have suited a minor duke inspecting drainage on his estate, but which had no obvious relationship to apiculture. He spoke darkly of stewardship, tradition, and “letting nature know we are serious”.

Horse Palmer, meanwhile, regarded the entire matter with calm confidence. He said bees were basically just flying livestock and would respond to the right tone of voice. “Same as geese,” he said, which did not reassure anybody, especially as no one had ever seen Horse enjoy a successful relationship with geese.

Abe Appleford was the only person involved who showed any sign of practical knowledge. He quietly asked whether anyone had spoken to an actual beekeeper, whether there was a plan for siting the hive sensibly, and whether the church had considered the small but relevant issue of people being stung. These contributions were received with the kind of silence usually reserved for a man who insists on reading the warranty before starting the mower. Abe, recognising the mood, said no more and leaned back with the expression of one who has seen this sort of thing before and expected to see it again.

Lionel Hargreaves became interested for reasons entirely his own. Having stood near the trial hive for several minutes with his head at an angle, he announced that the colony was “hovering somewhere between B flat minor and moral purpose”. After that he began referring to the workers as though they were a chamber ensemble. He claimed the drone deepened in moments of agitation and once described a busy spell around the entrance as “almost Monteverdi, but with wings”.

For a few weeks the project seemed, against all odds, to be going rather well. People said how lovely it was. Children were told that the bees were helping the flowers. A short item appeared in the notices under the heading CREATION CARE INITIATIVE. Perry spoke of heritage honey. Sandy, though privately alarmed by how little anyone knew, tried to remain optimistic.

Then came the churchyard event.

It was one of those determinedly cheerful parish afternoons involving folding tables, sponge cake, paper napkins, and tea poured at speed from urns of uncertain temperament. Judith Crowther had organised the whole thing with her usual administrative exactness and was not in a forgiving mood even before the swarm appeared.

Nobody was quite sure what caused it. Lionel later suggested that the bees had been artistically overstimulated by Dobb’s brass polishing. Horse believed they had sensed fear in the vicar. Perry thought there had been “some disturbance in the atmosphere”. Abe took one glance upward and said, “Well, there’s your problem,” in the deeply unhelpful manner of a man who had indeed identified the problem some weeks previously.

The swarm rose out of the churchyard with the sinister unity of a congregation spotting an error in the service sheet. People ducked. Children squealed with alarm while adults squealed with panic, and checked handbags for epi-pens. Perry attempted to assume command but was hampered by his hat, which the bees treated as a potential nesting site. Horse tried speaking to them firmly. This had no visible effect. Lionel stood at a distance, listening with fascination, and murmured, “Good heavens. They’ve modulated.”

And all the while Judith continued serving tea.

She did not run. She did not duck. She did not even spill. She stood behind the trestle table with the cold fury of a woman who had already survived grant applications, Easter rotas, and three separate incidents involving the photocopier, and who was not now about to be defeated by insects, musicology, or either in combination. “Milk?” she said to a trembling visitor, while somewhere above her head creation itself buzzed ominously.

In the end it was Abe, naturally, who sorted matters out, having appropriated Horse’s bee-keeping veil and deploying a practical box, while exuding the air of a man tidying up after amateurs.

The honey, when it eventually came, was excellent.

The committee has since agreed that this proves the project was a success. Abe says it proves only that the bees had more sense than the rest of them.

And, on the whole, that seems fair.
—-

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar — including all FIVE volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel — are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online.

For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment

It has always been the conviction of Mr Malcolm Bowyer, Hon. Treasurer of St Faithful’s, that giving to the church should involve a certain amount of discernment.

Not merely spiritual discernment, naturally. That would be too narrow. He means administrative discernment. Procedural discernment. The sort of discernment which begins with a charitable impulse and ends, forty minutes later, with a donor standing in the north aisle whimpering, “I’m so sorry, I only wanted to give them a tenner.”

It was in this spirit that Malcolm recently issued a paper to the congregation entitled Expanding Opportunities for Financial Participation in the Life of the Parish. It was, he explained, a vision document. Judith said it looked more like the police record of a hostage situation. Malcolm ignored this. He has long held that innovation is rarely appreciated at first.

The opening paragraph set the tone.

“At St Faithful’s,” it began, “we recognise that today’s donor is no longer content simply to give. Today’s donor seeks a bespoke stewardship experience, responsive to diverse preferences, transactional instincts, and levels of handwriting confidence.”

No one entirely knew what this meant, but it sounded expensive.

The paper went on to celebrate the fact that the parish now offered not one, not two, but what Malcolm called “a broad portfolio of generosity pathways”, enabling every Christian to support the work of God in a manner aligned to their personal gifting, financial habits, and appetite for mild bureaucratic challenge.

The first of these pathways was Parish Giving. A website.

This, Malcolm explained, was ideal for those who liked their discipleship to resemble a subscription model. It allowed regular giving or one-off giving, with or without Gift Aid, and had the reassuringly contemporary feel of paying for cloud storage or a premium television package. “Set and forget,” Malcolm wrote, apparently without noticing that this was perhaps not the most stirring phrase ever attached to Christian stewardship.

Still, it was efficient. Or at least it was modern, which nowadays is very nearly the same thing.

For those who preferred a more classical approach, there was direct BACS payment. This could be done either as a one-off transfer or as a standing order. Malcolm particularly favoured standing orders, since they conveyed the pleasing impression that generosity had been domesticated and made to occur monthly without anyone having to think about it again.

If Gift Aid was to be claimed, however, the donor must also complete a manual form and hand it personally to Malcolm.

This was not, he stressed, a flaw in the system.

It was an opportunity for relational connection.

By “relational connection” he evidently meant trying to identify where Malcolm currently was. He is not a man who can be summoned easily. He does not exactly lurk, but nor does he ever appear to stand anywhere accidentally. He may be found at the back of church with his glasses halfway down his nose examining a utility statement, or in the hall peering into a biscuit tin with all the joy of a man inspecting flood damage. To hand Malcolm a Gift Aid form is never merely to pass over a document. It is to complete a sort of pilgrimage.

Then there was Goodbox.

Malcolm described this as “our contactless front-end donation interface”, which made it sound less like a card machine and more like an attempt by the PCC to become the new Silicon Valley. It sat at the back of church with a serene expression, inviting worshippers to tap and give. With their card or their phone. It was quick, clean, and useful for those who wanted to support the kingdom of God while still wearing their coat.

There was, however, the small matter of the fee.

A discreet 3.5% of the donation would go to Goodbox, presumably in recognition of its own ministry of standing there and glowing faintly. And if the donor wished Gift Aid to be claimed, they must once again complete a manual declaration by other means, since no part of the modern giving ecosystem must ever become so integrated as to remove the possibility of confusion.

To alleviate the lack of gift aid facility on the Goodbox, the parish has now introduced a second ‘GWD donation station’, which has a facility by which donors may enter their address, date of birth and, one is led to believe, the deeds to their house, or possibly the baptism certificates of their grandchildren. This machine also deducts 3.5% for the privilege of glowing faintly.

Then we come to cash in the collection basket, which remains available for those with a nostalgic attachment to the idea that church giving might occur during church. Payment by cheque is also available via the collection plate - but donors must be very precise about to whom the cheque is made payable, or risk a tedious round of ‘donor-chase’ - a new game in which Malcolm chases down cheque-writers with illegible hand-writing, or inaccurate payee details, as a result of the cheque being rejected by the bank.

This method, Malcolm noted, was most effective when combined with a Gift Aid envelope. The envelope, of course, must first be found. It must then be opened, which in itself can be a test of character. One must then locate a biro, which at St Faithful’s is a task comparable to medieval relic-hunting. If successful, the donor may then complete their details while balancing against a pew, trying to remember their postcode under liturgical pressure.

There are people who appear to know their postcode instantly. These are not normal parishioners. Most have to close one eye and summon it from a deep place.

For those whose generosity comes mainly in coin form, there is also the wall safe near the entrance.

This system is especially appropriate for individuals who, upon entering church, discover two pound coins in a coat pocket and suddenly feel a movement of the Spirit. The coins may be inserted directly into the wall safe, where they join the parish economy in a manner Malcolm describes as “immediate low-friction transfer”.

If Gift Aid is required, however, the donor must complete a separate form and “leave it with someone”. Malcolm’s document was wonderfully vague on this point, noting only that the donor should hand it to “an appropriate person or place it where it may come to the Treasurer’s attention in due course”.

This phrase, Judith observed, had all the precision of an ancient prophecy.

Who was an appropriate person? Where was an appropriate place? No one could say. There was talk of a tray in the vestry, but this tray may also have contained old rotas, a dead wasp, and a receipt for sherry dated 2018. There was once a Gift Aid form found inside the intercessions folder. Another turned up in the church fridge, though in fairness that may have involved Dobbs, who believes all unattended paper should be put somewhere safe, even if that place is adjacent to the milk.

Whilst being glad to offer the facility of donation by cash or cheque, Malcolm also wants parishioners to understand that payment by these methods does involve an additional cost to the parish - in the form of the fuel required to drive to the nearest city to deposit the arcane payment method at an actual bank - since all the banks of Havnot have now gone the way of all things.

In addition to these direct giving methods, Malcolm was keen to highlight the opportunities presented by the parish raffle.

This, he said, was “an incentivised micro-donation environment”. In older and less developed cultures, it is known as buying tickets in the hope of winning a jar of Audrey Black’s marmalade, three bath salts, or a bottle-shaped object of uncertain contents.

Malcolm was firm that the raffle should not be seen as a mere fundraising gimmick. It was, he said, “a participation-driven surplus generation activity with prize-linked engagement architecture”. Judith said that if he used the phrase prize-linked engagement architecture one more time she would hit him with something architectural.

Then there was JustGiving, for those who wanted their benevolence to pass through the internet before reaching the altar. This had the considerable advantage of allowing one to donate from home, in comfort, with a cup of tea, avoiding all possibility of having to ask a churchwarden where the envelopes were now kept.

Malcolm liked JustGiving because it had reach. It had scale. It had a button, which could be attached to Facebook articles. He greatly admired buttons. If the kingdom of God could be advanced through a tasteful button, he saw no reason why it should not be.

Nor should one forget the charity shop.

Indeed, Malcolm gave an entire section of the document to what he called “retail-mediated missional support streams”. By this he meant that parishioners could donate items to the charity shop, where a volunteer would invite them to complete a Gift Aid declaration so that, if the item later sold, the parish might receive an associated financial benefit after a chain of events best understood only by tax professionals and one elderly lady called Brenda who volunteers on Tuesdays and appears to know things.

This method is particularly satisfying because it allows a person to declutter for Christ. An unwanted cardigan, a puzzle with only most of the pieces (but with a label ensuring the unwary that all the pieces are there, honestly), a commemorative plate from the Silver Jubilee, a hardback novel about submarines no one has opened since 1987: all may, in time, be transformed into a modest contribution to the work of God.

Even buying from the charity shop, Malcolm insisted, counted as support.

Admittedly, the route was indirect. Before any surplus reached the parish General Fund it had to survive wages, heating, maintenance, rates, bank charges, and the mysterious attrition that seems to descend upon all small retail operations. But Malcolm would not have it dismissed. “Every purchase,” he wrote, “contributes to the broader sustainability framework.”

In practice this means that if you buy a second-hand waffle maker for £3.50, roughly nine pence may one day flutter into parish finances, assuming the lights can remain on and no one has had to call out the boiler man.

Still, the principle matters.

By now the average reader of Malcolm’s document had ceased to experience it as guidance and had begun to experience it as an escape room.

One widow, having worked through the various options, asked whether there remained any recognised mechanism by which she could simply hand over some money and be done with it.

Malcolm smiled the smile of a man who has spent forty years waiting for such a question.

“Certainly,” he said. “Which channel did you have in mind?”

She said she had not realised there were channels.

“Oh yes,” said Malcolm. “We have many channels.”

He then took from his briefcase a laminated flow chart.

It was, by all accounts, magnificent.

At the top stood the words: HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO EXPRESS YOUR GENEROSITY TODAY?

Below this, the chart divided into coloured streams.

Would the donor prefer cash, card, digital transfer, retail participation, speculative ticketed philanthropy, or legacy textile conversion?

If cash, was this note-based, coin-based or cheque-based?

If note-based, did the donor intend anonymity, envelope-enabled declaration, or provisional basket insertion pending later clarification?

If coin-based, was the gift to be directed into the wall safe, a collection receptacle, or one of the radiators, where a surprising quantity of parish income has historically gone?

If digital, did the donor seek immediacy, regularity, platform satisfaction, or the emotional thrill of typing in sort codes while doing God’s work?

If via the charity shop, did the donor wish to donate stock, purchase stock, or simply stand in the doorway murmuring “It all helps” without committing to anything?

The flow chart concluded, after seventeen branches and one dotted line marked “ask Malcolm”, in a box reading: THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING ST FAITHFUL’S AS YOUR PREFERRED GIVING DESTINATION.

At this point Dobbs, who had been silent throughout, declared that the Church of England had finally mistaken itself for an airport.

He had a point.

There was now, at St Faithful’s, no recognised human impulse that could not be redirected into a giving mechanism. For the digitally nimble and the technologically cursed. For the envelope enthusiast and the contactless optimist. For the raffle dreamer, the marmalade gambler, the standing-order ascetic, the shop donor, the shop buyer, the wall-safe mystic, and the occasional worshipper who arrives with a handful of pound coins and a look of doomed determination.

No impulse towards generosity, however fleeting, need now go unsupported by supplementary paperwork.

And perhaps that is the real triumph of Malcolm’s vision.

Not that giving has been simplified. Heaven forbid. Simplicity is for amateurs. No, what has been achieved is something far greater: the conversion of generosity into a fully diversified parish encounter, in which every act of giving may be enriched by uncertainty, multiplied through process, and dignified by at least one form in duplicate.

Some have murmured that all this may be slightly absurd.

Malcolm rejects such negativity.

“The modern donor,” he says, “expects optionality.”

And somewhere in the vestry, among old notices, raffle stubs, and three biros that no longer work, lies the future of the Church.

It is labelled, cross-referenced, and waiting to be signed.

---

THE SMALL PRINT FROM HAVNOT

St Faithful’s is fictional. The affection is real. Books by Canon Tom Kennar — including all FIVE volumes of The Parish Life and our first novel — are available in print and e-book.

St Faithful’s merchandise is also available online.

For books, merch, and links to Canon Tom’s Substack (where paid subscribers receive sermons and reflections ahead of key Sundays and preaching dates), see https://tinyurl.com/4k9jtpbe

St Faithful’s books are also on sale in person at St Faith’s Charity Shop, 4 North Street, Havant.

AI may assist with these posts. The drafting and publishing responsibility is entirely human.

Leave a comment