And Nuala’s eyes lit up, just like Lisa’s had.
Medensworth isn’t all one big housing estate, though it might look it at first glance. There is still an Old Medensworth. It’s bypassed by the main road now, which moves rapidly on towards the sprawl that is New Medensworth. But the old village has an eighteenth century pub serving eighteenth century meat and potato pie. It has some dinky stone cottages lived in by old ladies who’ve been there since the Year Dot. And it has a manor house, looking a bit battered and neglected, which is often the subject of speculation that it’s about to be turned into a conference centre or nursing home. Probably it’ll just fall down before they get round to it.
Best of all, though, it has St Asaph’s Parish Church. Bits of this god box are Saxon, and bits of it are Norman, with later congregations adding their fancies to it in a wonderful sort of hotchpotch. It’s like a complete record of the last thousand years of what passes for civilisation in this part of the world. Around it there’s the churchyard, the quietest spot you’ll find for miles, full of crumbling gravestones and ancient yew trees.
Lisa says there’s nothing quite like an old churchyard for making you feel in touch with the past. All those dead folk lying under your feet. You can tell which of them were rich gits by the size of their memorial stones. I’m more interested in the plain ordinary folk, as you’ve probably guessed. They’re a bit special to me. Among this lot will be the actual stonemasons and carpenters and labourers who built the church. Just go inside and look at the thing if you still want to know why they’re special.
When I walk in that churchyard, I can hear them talking to me. What they say isn’t always complimentary, true — but I can take it. They agree with me on one thing, though — the rich gits should be in the lower, hotter bit of eternity.
Down at St Asaph’s you’ll find the Reverend Gordon Bowring, usually just known as The Rev. He’s one of those young vicars — by which I suppose I mean that he’s younger than me. Not much above thirty anyway. A child of the Sixties, like. And that means his ideas are more, well... modern than some of the C of E types I’ve come across before.
He isn’t from round these parts, as anybody can tell from his habit of leaving his car unlocked outside his house. In fact, he’s a bit of a southern nancy, to be honest. He was in a parish in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire or somewhere soft before he came to Nottinghamshire.
The story goes that he got carried away one day and preached a sermon that said it was basically okay to nick things from supermarkets. He meant that if you were poor and hungry, the big businesses wouldn’t miss the odd tin of chicken and mushroom soup or a packet of chocolate Hobnobs.
But the details of the message sort of got ignored, as they do. This scary vicar had said it was okay to steal things. Shock horror, stories in the tabloids and questions asked at the General Synod. And before he could get his cassock off or swing his thurible, the Reverend Gordon Bowring had been banished to the arse-end of the Midlands, where he couldn’t do any harm. I suppose they thought that if he told folk in Medensworth it was okay to nick stuff they’d wonder what the hell he was talking about. People here are brought up to nick things — they don’t need one of the god squad giving them permission, thank you very much.
The Rev is not what you might expect for such a villain. He’s no more than five foot six or seven, and his hair is vanishing rapidly despite his age. Perhaps it’s all that worrying about sin. I try not to do any worrying at all on this subject, and it hasn’t harmed me. The Rev’s eyes always look vaguely troubled too. He dresses in a really trendy style — well, I seem to remember it was trendy back in the Seventies — and he talks like the Oxford bleedin’ dictionary. They should have sent an interpreter up from Berkshire with him. His congregation here have trouble understanding him half the time. Me, I sometimes understand what he’s saying. But I can’t understand what he’s thinking, no way. His brain processes defy logic.
Just imagine a small child surrounded by Lego bricks. He has to build a model of a cathedral, and he’s been told he can only use the white bricks. But he finds that all the bricks he’s been given are red ones, and they’re such a funny shape that they’ll only fit together in certain ways, and the building they make is starting to look more like a set of sheds on an allotment. Somehow the child has to convince himself that his bricks are white, and that what he’s building is a cathedral. How does he do it? Well, he turns colour blind and becomes the world’s biggest fan of avant-garde modern architecture, that’s how. Meet the Rev.
When I parked the Impreza outside St Asaph’s, I hadn’t intended bumping into him. I only wanted to take a squint at the rotas in the church porch. I’m down on the churchyard rota, you see — which means, I suppose, that in theory I take my turn at tidying up round the graves and keeping the grass in trim. Well, you’d be surprised how fast the weeds grow in the summer. It’s practically a full-time job, and obviously the church can’t afford to pay anyone. So a group of us caring local citizens put our names down to look after the task in turn. The Rev thinks we’re wonderful. And he never seems to care whether we actually do any work, bless him.
For my reasons of my own, I wanted to get my name down for a turn on the rota this week. It was no problem, as there are always plenty of spare periods.
The one thing I had to do was make sure my spell was clear of the times when our churchwarden, Welsh Border, was working. He isn’t actually Welsh — far from it, he’s born and bred in Medensworth, and he won’t hesitate to let you know it. He’s Councillor Border to his face, chairman of the parish council, retired accountant and a bugger for wanting to do things right. I don’t fit into his scheme of things at all, and he has a horrible suspicious mind. I can’t do with Welsh Border hanging around when I’m putting in my spell of good work.
Lisa knows about this, but it was a new concept to Nuala when I explained to her about the volunteer rota. She looked awestruck, like she’d just had a vision of the Virgin Mary. I nipped up to the porch as quick as I could, but the Rev was just coming out of the vestry door and he buttonholed me before I could escape.
“Ah, Livingstone. Giving of your time as generously as ever, I see. How wonderful. Giving is the greatest of joys, is it not?”
He’s the only person who gets to call me Livingstone, apart from my Uncle Willis. Maybe that says something.
“Yes, Rev.”
I’ve found this is the best way to deal with him — just agree with whatever he says. You can’t disillusion somebody who already looks so worried and is almost bald before he’s thirty-five. It would be cruel, like telling the child with the Lego that he’d just built a public toilet instead of Westminster Abbey.
“I see you’ve got your delightful young lady with you. Lisa, isn’t it?”
The Rev gave a coy little wave towards the car, and Nuala waved back from the passenger seat, for all the world like the Queen Mother or something. I swear these two are on another planet. For a start, the Rev obviously couldn’t tell the difference between one bird and another, which in my book makes any bloke a very sad person indeed.
“Yeah, I was just taking her home, so—”
“I’ve been wondering when we might have the honour at St Asaph’s of reading the banns for the McClure nuptials,” simpered the Rev. “Might that be in prospect at some date in the not too distant future?”
For a minute I honestly hadn’t a clue what he was on about. I always thought nuptials were what Nuala would be up to half an hour later in my bedroom. But I’d never heard the Rev talk smutty before. Was he really talking about banning it? Then I mentally translated his words into English, and the penny dropped.