Read Time to Be in Earnest Online
Authors: P. D. James
Tags: #General, #Literary, #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Novelists; English 20th Century Diaries, #Novelists; English, #Biography & Autobiography, #Authorship
In New York, 1980, for the American publication of
Innocent Blood
, which reached number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list
(Photograph by Susan Gray)
The first Anglia television series,
Death of an Expert Witness
, in 1983. With John Rosenberg (producer), Herbie Wise (director) and Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh
(Photograph courtesy Anglia TV)
The ceremony was to have been in a small upper room over the porch, but Mary was afraid that I would find the narrow twisting stairway too claustrophobic to climb. So the blessing was held before the altar with the family sitting opposite each other in the choir stalls. Tom and Mary had devised the ceremony with the help of Father Barry, the parish priest, and it was a mixture of Christian liturgy with a reading by Clare from an Eastern mystic, and translated Gaelic blessings and prayers because Tom and Mary had first met in Ireland. Father Barry seemed to take the innovations in his stride and the service was simple and very moving.
Afterwards we piled out into the sunshine where a patient group of people were waiting for the church to be reopened. They joined in the general laughter and happiness and Clare asked one of them to take a photograph of the group. “I thought you’d never ask me,” he said. “I’ve been waiting here for ages.” Let’s hope it comes out.
Afterwards, back at the Southwold house, there was a cake provided by Clare with the Union Jack and Australian flag, and champagne from Peter of a quality seldom met with at weddings large or small. Katie looked bonny and happy. Her journey seems to be a spiritual odyssey as well as a great feat of endurance. Granddaughter Eleanor wasn’t well, but had insisted on coming. I think she is finding her teaching job exceptionally arduous. The children, apart from the ill-discipline one expects these days, have had no home training either in manners or social skills, and their attention span is so short that learning is almost impossible. But Nell said that she was trying hard to establish good relationships with the parents of some of the most difficult children. They might come up to the school to confront her belligerently, but once they understood she was genuinely trying to help their child, they became cooperative and grateful. But it really is an extraordinarily tough job. I’m not surprised that we have a shortage of good teachers. I’m sometimes amazed that we have any.
I’m glad that the day was so successful. It will be a wonderful memory for all of us, and particularly for Clare. Tom is an only son and it will be hard for her to say goodbye to him when he leaves for Australia.
I went to 11 o’clock Mass at All Saints, Margaret Street. One of the post-Communion hymns was “Jesu, Good Above All Other,” a hymn frequently sung at assembly at Cambridge High School. It is odd how hymns can trigger off memories of the past more strongly than visual scenes or smells. At all the schools I attended we had morning assembly consisting of prayers including the Lord’s Prayer, a reading from scripture and a hymn. My memory of the British School in Ludlow is that we had no hymn books but sang the same hymns over and over again. Could this really be so? During prayers the older children, those nearing eleven, by some childish unwritten prescription were privileged merely to bow their heads and loosely link their fingers. We, the smaller ones, had to raise our arms, palms pressed.
I can’t have been at the National School long before we moved to Cambridge, and I began half-way through the first term of the new school year at the High School. Here too every morning began with assembly. We would file into the hall by form while one of the more musical girls would thump out a march on the piano. The Headmistress, Miss Dovey, commonly called The Dove, would stand there in her gown, the other mistresses ranged against the walls, also gowned. I remember on my first day how impressed I was by this first sight of academic dress, the visible symbol that I was, indeed, a High School pupil.
I was born and bred in the distinctive odour of Anglicanism, which childhood memory identifies as the smell of old prayer books, flowers, brass, stone and polished wood, the whole overlaid by the occasional sweet pungency of incense. I early grew accustomed to its services. Because Father, a middle-grade civil servant, was relatively poor, my parents employed no resident servant to help look after us children, even in those days when wages were low. This meant that, until we moved to Cambridge, when my father gave up going to church, the whole family attended Sunday Evensong together.
I must have been about five years old when we moved from Oxford to Ludlow and I can remember long autumnal Sunday evenings (my memory is always of going to church in the fading light and coming out into darkness): my brother fast asleep against my mother, my sister dozing,
and myself reading the Book of Common Prayer to relieve the boredom of sermons which were not only long but invariably well above my understanding. I was fascinated by the prayer book—less by the liturgy than by the accompanying text. I can remember at a very early age being impressed by the rubric in the Communion Service that when in times of plague no one could be found to take Communion with the sick then the priest only might do so, and I would sit there in the darkened church with a vivid imagining of crosses on doors, wailing voices and the heroic figure of the cloaked priest moving silently and swiftly through the deserted streets, bearing the sacred vessels.
But my experience of church-going was even earlier. Both my parents had a deep affection for church music, my mother from nostalgia and sentiment, my father because he loved organ music, and they would frequently attend Sung Evensong in the College chapels as well as the services in the Cathedral. I would be wheeled in my pram and left outside the chapel doors (this was an age when mothers had no fear of their children being snatched), or even carried, sleeping, into the chapel. Thus listening to the music and hearing the liturgy of the church were two of my very early and formative experiences and Cranmer’s magnificent cadences seeped into my first consciousness.
When we lived in the house called The Woodlands on the fringes of Ludlow our nearest church was over the bridge at Ludford. I have only two memories of Ludford church: the tortoise stove which flared dramatically when the wind changed, reminding me of the tongues of fire at Whitsun, and a remarkable prayer book which had been left in the pew in which we normally sat. It had heavy brass clasps which I would discreetly click open and shut during the service, and one of my earliest temptations was the wish somehow to conceal the prayer book and take it home with me. Surely it wouldn’t be stealing. I should be returning with it every Sunday evening. It was the first object I remember wanting to possess with real passion.
I have a memory, too, of Ludford Sunday school. All the children were given a card with blank spaces and each week we were handed a coloured sticker of a biblical scene to fix to the appropriate space. I had no choice about attending Sunday school but, even if I had, it would have been important to complete my card without any humiliating blanks. After a common prayer and hymn we would disperse to sit in little groups according to age. Our group had a teacher who must have been extremely inexperienced; perhaps she was filling in for someone
more orthodox. Certainly she spent little time in telling us Bible stories, but did recount the more lurid examples from
Foxes Book of Martyrs
, which both thrilled and half-terrified us. I don’t think these gory details of rackings and burnings kept me awake at night, nor did they affirm me as a natural Protestant.
My mother in particular was naturally ecumenical and had friends who were Roman Catholics and others who were Methodists or belonged to the more esoteric Protestant sects. It was never at any time suggested to me that one form of Christianity was necessarily superior to any other. My mother, indeed, was much in demand as a member of the Talkers Circuit and was frequently asked to address meetings of the Women’s Bright Hour. I can remember being taken with her and sitting, legs dangling, among the female audience while my mother gave comforting and lively little homilies on “Meals in the Bible,” “Journeys in the Bible,” or any other similar theme on which she could hang her gentle moralizing. Mother enjoyed amateur theatricals but had no opportunity to participate except at concerts in aid of the church. I remember a performance of
Babes in the Wood
which she wrote or produced (probably both) and in which Edward was a babe, and Monica and I gnomes. Then there was the Sunday school dance troupe. Dressed in such costumes as she could improvise, we would perform deeply inauthentic folk dances, prancing uncertainly across the stage while Mother mouthed encouragement and occasional desperate instructions from the piano.
When we moved from The Woodlands to a tall terraced house in Linney View overlooking the water meadows and close to Ludlow Castle, we began attending St. Lawrence’s parish church, where my father sang in the choir. Here, too, our usual service was Evensong. There seemed, as I remember, to have been a social distinction between Mattins, sometimes followed by Holy Communion, and the evening service. Those who had servants to cook their Sunday lunch went in the morning; those who, like my mother, had to do all their own housework and cooking, usually found it more convenient to go in the evening. But occasionally on special days we would be taken to a Sung Holy Communion and I can remember the great glory of these occasions and my sense that something mysterious and extremely important was happening at the altar, and that, left in the pew with my brother and sister while my parents went up to receive the wafer and wine, I was temporarily deprived of something which one day would be mine also and which I would enter into as I might an inheritance. It was, too, an important
Sunday for us when it was my father’s turn to carry the processional cross, the pride of the occasion being somewhat dimmed for me by the terrifying fear that one day he might drop it.
My mother’s faith was uncritical, unintellectual, simple and sentimental. It provided solace, nostalgia, reassurance and such social life as she enjoyed. She liked us to say our evening prayers at her knee, a practice which obviously gave her satisfaction but which I found acutely embarrassing. I accepted that there must be public prayers in church but felt that private prayer should be a matter between me and God. But religion in our home was never made into a source of guilt. We were made to feel guilty enough, but these were sins against an occasionally terrifying earthly father, not against God. God and fear seemed to me two opposing, irreconcilable ideas. And because my mother in particular took a lively part in church affairs, I never from my earliest age assumed that churchgoers were necessarily morally superior to other people, since experience showed me that they were not. There were the seemingly inevitable disputes at Easter-time and Harvest Festival about who should and should not decorate the altar and pulpit, and my mother voiced her dissatisfaction at always being given one of the darkest windows. There were the usual arguments between the organist and the vicar about the hymns and the music, and the annual church fête and sale of work provoked mutterings about members of the congregation notable for their bossiness. But the church was always there, immutable, unchanging, comforting and secure, and the year given a recognizable shape by its festivals and seasons.
When we moved to Cambridge we no longer worshipped as a family. My brother gained a place in the choir at Clare College, which kept him busy singing the services on Sunday and attending rehearsals on some weekdays, and my mother attended St. Mary’s parish church. Occasionally I went with her but my school friend and I preferred the smaller St. Edward’s Church, where within two years we were both prepared for confirmation by Father Colin Marr. Looking back, it seems that I took confirmation as very much a rite of passage unaccompanied by any particular spiritual enthusiasm. In those days candidates were not confirmed in their own parish church but together in a large group either in the Cathedral or in a church sufficiently large for the purpose. My best friend Joan and I were confirmed together at St. Luke’s Church in Cambridge by the Bishop of Ely and I remember the massed pews of white-clad veiled girls and, opposite, the boys in their blue Sunday-best suits.