‘Is that good?’ said Father Bernard.
‘It’s about seven hundred years old.’
Father Bernard looked impressed.
‘They should open this place for a museum,’ he whispered to Farther. ‘They must have kept everything they’ve ever owned.’
It was true. Nothing, it seemed, had ever escaped the oak doors or the castle-thick walls. Any light that had entered through the windows had been held captive and absorbed into the wood. Over the centuries the pews, pulpit and misericords had blackened to ebony like the beams which supported the roof — each one made from the fork of a huge oak tree, giving the congregation the sense of being inside an upturned boat.
The smells of benedictions and snuffed candles remained as steadfast as the gravestones that floored the central aisle. The doors to the aumbrey opened on hinges that had been forged at a time when they still dunked witches and died of plague. It was a place where wafer ovens, alms boxes and rush-holders remained as working tools; where there was a sanctuary knocker, a parish chest carved out of a single trunk of walnut, and a Table of Consanguinity attached to the wall above the font as a ready-reckoner to prevent interbreeding amongst the ignorant poor. Though I suppose by the time the child was being dipped into the water, it was rather too late.
At the end of pews were effigies of the Seven Deadly Sins, smoothed almost to anonymity by the countless hands that had gripped them during genuflection. But one could just make out Sloth curled up like a dormouse, and Gluttony vomiting on his own beard and Wrath beating his brother man with the jawbone of an ass.
Between the nave and the chancel, the church still had its rood screen with its painted melange of saints at the bottom and the crucifixion at the top. Above it was part of a Doom painting, and though much of it had flaked off it was still a considerable size and sprawled like dark rot across the stone.
‘It’s the only one I’ve ever seen north of Gloucester,’ said Farther, leaning close to Father Bernard again and pointing up to it. ‘I mean it’s got nothing on the ones at Patcham or Wenhaston, but still.’
‘I wouldn’t have it on my wall,’ Father Bernard said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Farther. ‘It has a certain charm.’
‘Rather you than me.’
When I was a child and I believed all that Father Wilfred said about Hell and damnation, the Doom gave me no end of sleepless nights at Moorings. I suppose because, in a sense, I already knew the place it depicted and that meant it might just be real.
It reminded me of the school playground with its casual despotism and the constant anxiety of never knowing which traits in a boy might be punishable with instant violence. Too tall, too small. No father, no mother. Wet trousers. Broken shoes. Wrong estate. Sluttish sister. Nits.
Hell was a place ruled by the logic of children. Schadenfreude that lasted for eternity.
In the painting, the damned were forced down through a narrow crack in the earth, crushed against one another, swimming headfirst through the soil, before they tumbled in a naked landslide towards the clutches of lascivious black-skinned demons who grasped their hair and drove red hot knives into their flesh. Yet, this was only the initial punishment. They had merely fallen on the welcome mat, where some of the old lags of Hades had gathered to pray for the souls of these newcomers in the vain hope of their own redemption, their faces upturned, their mouths wide open and desperate, like blackbird chicks.
From here, the wicked were collected in enormous cauldrons to be cooked for Satan, who squatted like a sort of horned toad and dipped into the pots with a fondue fork, impaling the squirming human worms and swallowing them down whole, presumably to slither through his bowels and out the other end to begin the whole process once more.
In other parts of Hell were tortures so vile they bordered on being funny, which in turn worried me even more. The mockery of Hell, I thought, would result in an even worse punishment if I ever ended up there.
In one dark corner a demon had its arm down a man’s throat so far that it came out of his backside to throttle the woman cowering beneath him. People had their limbs torn off and were hung upside down by hooks through their privates. Some had their tongues nailed to trees and their bellies slit to feed the slavering dogs that obediently attended the devils. Eyeballs were pecked out by things that looked like oversized starlings. Boiling lead was funnelled down throats. Severed heads were emptied of blood to irrigate the paddy fields of black weeds that grew up the sheer rock walls of Hell and broke through into the lush green pastures of the living to ensnare the sunflowers and the lilies growing there. It was all Father Wilfred had promised us it would be.
***
As we had always done when we’d come to the Tenebrae service in the past we doubled the congregation in one fell swoop. The few people kneeling with their faces in their hands were the same people that had always been there. And when they broke out of their prayers, they looked at us not as strangers but as people they half recognised even though it had been years since we’d last come.
‘Isn’t that Clement?’ said Mr Belderboss, pointing to someone sitting alone in one of the side pews.
‘Yes, I think it is,’ Mrs Belderboss replied and she tried to attract his attention.
‘His mother’s not with him, though,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘I wonder why?’
‘Well, she’s perhaps not up to church anymore,’ Mrs Belderboss replied. ‘She is getting on, I suppose.’
Mummer shushed them as the organist struck up a dirge and a miserable-looking altar boy, acned and gangly, brought out the hearse, placed it on a low table and lit the fifteen candles with a taper. He went away again and came back with a small, fat candle that he lit and placed down under the altar out of sight.
The priest came in and we all stood up. He gave a brief introduction — his voice thudding around the stone walls and gathering into a boom — and then the two hour cycle of Matins and Lauds began — all in Latin of course — and after each a candle was extinguished by the altar boy until little by little the church darkened to match the encroaching gloom outside.
The wind continued to rise and fall. Whining and shrilling. It was as insistent as the priest, louder sometimes, preaching an older sermon, about the sand and the sea. Warning the faithful to stay away from The Loney.
Hanny fell asleep but no one bothered him, as Mr Belderboss had done the same, leaning his fluffy white head against my shoulder. In any case, Mummer was too engrossed in a contest with Miss Bunce as to who could be the most moved by the ceremony. At each increment of darkness, Mummer held her rosary tighter and prayed harder. Miss Bunce had tears in her eyes when Jesus called out to God and the candles on the hearse were snuffed out in quick succession. She even managed a small, anguished wail of her own when in the darkness the altar boy went down the aisle and slammed the heavy church doors shut to symbolise the earthquake that had buckled Golgotha at the moment Jesus’ human heart stopped beating.
Mr Belderboss woke with a start and clutched at his chest.
***
Once the service was over and the single candle that had been secreted under the altar had been brought out to symbolise the promise of resurrection, we filed out into the rain. The altar boy held an umbrella over the priest as he quickly clamped each cold hand in his and passed on God’s blessing. The regulars disappeared quickly, back to the sombre little houses hunkered down in the rain around the village green and as soon as the last person was out of the church, which was Mr Belderboss, rolling up and down on the cam of his bad hip, the priest went back inside and closed the door.
‘Well,’ said Mummer, as we walked back to the minibus. ‘I thought that was a lovely service.’