A House Unlocked

  There was a rota of flower arrangers for ordinary Sundays, but the major festivals were traditionally my grandmother's preserve. When I was fourteen I was allocated the potted-meat jars. No doubt it was seen as a privilege and a mark of maturity. The pulpit was the feature in question: what you had to do was set each jar against one of the upright bits of its woodwork, pass a length of raffia twine behind and attempt to knot this around the slippery neck of the glass jar. Eastertime seems always to have been bitterly chill; the raffia defied cold fingers, the jars lurched from side to side. After an hour or two of this endeavour you at last had the pulpit studded all over with jars which you then filled with water to serve as containers for primroses, scillas and jonquils. The whole structure was then carefully masked by a shroud of ivy from which the flowers rose, miraculously fresh. It was my grandmother's pièce de résistance.

  Christmas was differently arduous, and even more uncomfortable. The temperature within the church was lower than that outside – shedding coat, scarf or gloves would have been out of the question. You were already chilled to the bone from foraging in the Golsoncott garden for ivy, holly and other greenery. This huge wet mass was then piled into the back of Rachel's Land-Rover to be taken to the church and hauled inside, soaking yourself and the church floor in the process. Every window-sill had to be swathed; likewise the font, the ends of the pews, and the pulpit again. Stabbed by holly and tripped by ivy, I endured a seasonal martyrdom, spurred on by my grandmother's exhortations but not sharing her commitment. For her, this embellishment of the little church seemed to have a significance far beyond the actual effect. I can remember her stubbornly insisting on doing it in the midst of a bout of flu.

  Certainly, the ritual of church decoration must be a deeply atavistic one. The hefty use of foliage in the Rodhuish ceremonial smacks to me most interestingly of tree-worship. Holly. Ivy. Admittedly the attraction of both for decorative purposes is that they are evergreen. And they are of course the stuff of carols. But both plants are also freighted with myth, especially ivy, which is sacred to Osiris, who is a tree-spirit and a god of vegetation, and to Dionysus, also associated with tree-worship, but perhaps above all to the god Attis. He was believed to die and be resurrected in spring; this belief was commemorated in a gruesome festival where frenzied followers of his cult emasculated themselves, the god having done the same under a pine and been returned to life in the form of the tree. The cult of Attis in Roman times had ornate and complex rites, all to do with slaughter, blood, rebirth and so forth. It is impossible not to see the Christian Easter rites as an echo of those earlier ones. The ropes of ivy hauled in the Land-Rover to the church from the Golsoncott garden take on a murky and immemorial symbolism.

  We sat in the second pew from the front on the left of the aisle. Always. It would have been unthinkable to sit elsewhere; equally unthinkable for anyone else to invade that pew. And all other regular attenders sat too in their established places. The farmer's wife, Mrs Thomas, sat centre-right with her daughters and small son; an old lady from one of the cottages front-right; an elderly couple back-left. Certain pews were always empty. How an unwary casual visitor would have coped with this unswerving customary occupancy, goodness knows.

  For customary it was, and surely an echo of the ubiquitous earlier practice whereby church seating not only reflected the social structures of the parish but tethered each house to a particular pew or ‘kneeling’. Those parishioners who moved house or left the area relinquished their right to an established position in the church each Sunday. And where you sat indicated your status – gentry at the front, yeomen and husbandmen in the middle, cottagers at the rear. Richard Gough's The History of Myddle (written around 1700) uses the seating plan of his parish church a few miles north of Shrewsbury to give a vivid and discursive account of an entire community in the late seventeenth century, family by family, person by person. Who was married to whom, who lived where and bequeathed what, who was ‘pilfering, thievish’, who ‘went dayly to the alehouse’, who ‘lived very high and kept a pack of beagles’. The church layout becomes in effect a mnemonic system. Gough plots the occupancy of the pews and enters names and locations into each: ‘Mr Ackerley for servants’, ‘Sleap Hall’, ‘Watsons tent [tenement], Davis Cottage, Baxters Cottages, Chidlows Cottage’. And the names and places become prompts – from them stream sharp vignettes of neighbours and acquaintances, what they were like and what they did, the army of people that inhabited his memory and who could be conjured up by a simple survey of the interior of the parish church.

  Richard Gough's was a society in which everyone knew everyone else, and a strange face was startling. Everyone was also familiar with everyone else in Rodhuish in the late 1940s, but few people in this country today know the experience of being amazed by the presence of strangers. Gough was an educated man and a local historian, but the zest and relish with which he records those he remembers is that of an inspired gossip – one intimately involved with a community and appreciative of human foibles. However, what is most striking today about his resurrection of a vanished world is the way in which each home, each household, each person is linked to the parish church. Not only were the climactic moments of every parishioner's life stored there – baptism, marriage, burial – but where they sat on Sunday nailed them for who and what they were.

  St Bartholomew's in Rodhuish is not the parish church. That is Old Cleeve, a few miles away. Generations of local residents are recorded and buried there, as are my own grandparents and aunt. But today many local people will seldom, if ever, set foot in it and their births, marriages and deaths will not be noted there. The majority of the population has floated free of the established churches and a local connection with them. Around 1700, when Richard Gough was writing, pretty well everyone would have shown up in the local church of a Sunday. At Rodhuish today, there are about eight people who sustain St Bartholomew's by attending services and struggling to raise sufficient funds to pay the quota and keep the building running. Most of them are grey-headed. Its very survival as a functioning church is threatened.

  I am an agnostic. I came out as such at around fifteen and faced up to my grandmother. In mitigation of my position I went through the Ten Commandments with her to demonstrate that I still subscribed to much the same moral code as she did – I believed it was profoundly wrong to kill people or to steal, and wrong to tell lies unless under exceptional circumstances. I believed you should honour your father and your mother, but with a few reservations. On the whole I passed on the question of coveting thy neighbour's wife and all that because surely the point was to legislate with regard to actions rather than emotions, which you couldn't do much about. And on the question of blasphemy we would have to differ. My grandmother took this pretty well though she wasn't very happy about it, but she was more flexible in some of her attitudes than one might have expected and never held this dereliction against me.

  Politics were another matter. There, it was simply a matter of common sense, as far as my grandmother was concerned. She would listen kindly to my sanctimonious spiels about equality of opportunity and social injustice, with a half-smile on her face. She wouldn't have known the expression ‘wet behind the ears’, but that was what she was thinking. So the child proposes to vote Labour when she's twenty-one, does she? When I had finished she would eye me and produce her trump card: ‘That's all very well, my dear, but who, may I ask, are then going to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water?’ Back to the Authorized Version.

  She was an old Tory. The Toryism of noblesse oblige – not in an aristocratic sense, because she wasn't that, but simply on account of a belief that to them that hath there is a certain obligation of redistribution. She was involved with a swathe of charities, with the village hall and the church. It went beyond mere financial subsidy – there was an obligation to play a part in local life, to know everybody, to take an interest in and have an opinion on local issues. Patronizing, patrician and no way to run a country – but to my mind a cut a
bove some of the versions of conservatism we've seen since. And the role and function of the Church of England was central to her priorities and concerns. She was a paid-up Christian, but church attendance implied more than mere spiritual solace; to her, support of the church was support of the social structure. In that sense she was still a late Victorian, I suppose.

  And now, in the year 2000, her agnostic granddaughter finds herself contemplating with dismay the prospect of Rodhuish church being perhaps sold off by the Church of England. Closed down. De-frocked. Reinvented as a weekend cottage, maybe. It could very well happen. I am not often able to attend a service there these days, but do so whenever possible. An ambiguous position and perhaps hypocritical to some; I myself see it as confused, but defensible on grounds of emotional commitment, if not intellectual clarity. I am there not to worship but to honour this ancient and significant little building and to acknowledge what it commemorates – the centuries of Christian dominance with all that they imply, from religious persecution to the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

  In 1958 there were already 370 redundant Church of England churches. Between then and 1990 a further 1,261 were made redundant, leaving some 16,000 functioning churches. These figures do not of course take into account the Nonconformist places of worship which have also fallen into disuse. A church or chapel you see today may no longer be used as such – it may be an antiques centre, a warehouse, a hall available for hire, a shopping complex or an office. It may have been given the full creative architectural going-over and reinvented as a private house. Or it may be clinging to life in the hands of the Churches Conservation Trust, to be preserved on heritage grounds and given the occasional treat of a specially contrived service. There is an elaborate mechanism for the processing of threatened churches, set up by the Church Commissioners in 1968, after a report on the problem of galloping church redundancy made clear the need for a consistent policy and strategy. The Redundant Churches Fund (now the Churches Conservation Trust) was created, charged with looking after those churches selected for preservation, the costs to be shared between Church and State, with the State providing the lion's share. Between 1969 and 1989, only just over 20 per cent of churches declared redundant ended up in the benign hands of the Redundant Churches Fund. Of the rest, 55 per cent were reinvented as antiques centres, etc., and 24 per cent were laid to eternal rest by bulldozers.

  The large majority of churches within those two last categories will have been Victorian, nineteenth-century inner-city churches, or churches originally servicing the first suburban expansions. Not listed buildings, not considered heritage material except by a few fervent defenders. By and large, the bulldozers do not move in on little country churches, where even those no longer making use of them would be outraged by the destruction of an apparently immemorial landmark. Rodhuish is probably safe from that threat. Its fate, if it comes to that, will be in the hands of the Church Commissioners.

  The property page of a weekend newspaper serves up timely examples of four converted churches. All appear to be nineteenth-century. A handsome late Victorian building with campanile in south London is now ‘six stunning houses’, one with ornate columns, arches and a rose window. A brick-built former chapel in a Devon village has two and a half acres (with triple stable block and large paddock). A Victorian Congregational chapel in Fowey is now three houses – ‘many original features including arched leaded windows and exposed old church timbers’. A Grade II listed chapel in Gloucestershire has a galleried sitting area and bedroom with en suite shower room. All sound quite enticing, from a house-hunter's point of view. But they come loaded with significance, rich with resonance. The air must be thick with organ and with hymn, with voices united in praise or murmuring in prayer. Emotion, too: the joining in holy matrimony and departing in peace. And who would be able to fix the evening drinks without sensing the outraged glare of the minister?

  The Church of England itself appears to take a pragmatic view of this sustained erosion of the ubiquitous visual reminders of what it once was. It can hardly do otherwise, I suppose. Given the unstoppable decline in church attendance over the twentieth century, there is nothing for it but to accept the situation and try to work out the most sensible way to dispose of the plant, as it were. Many people – including my agnostic self – would prefer to see a church doing what it was built to do, but if that is no longer happening then action has to be taken. The Church Commissioners are not keen on conspicuous dereliction or, indeed, on the bulldozers. Both, after all, send out rather unfavourable signals. Admittedly, the site of a demolished church can be sold and the proceeds devoted to some other realm of activity, but the explosion of bricks and dust will still have made a point. As do broken windows and boarded-up doors. Better to diversify and reinvent (bowling alley? wine bar?). And, when needs must, consign to the hands of the heritage industry.

  The Church's problem is that it remains inextricably entwined with a widespread surviving physical presence that is no longer an appropriate reflection. A church looks like a church and nothing else, and tends to continue to do so however crafty the conversion. Bowling alley and wine bar may be commercially attractive but do nothing for the image of the Church of England. In this country, cities are peppered with churches and in rural areas you are seldom out of sight of a tower or a steeple. John Ogilby's seventeenth-century road maps used steeple, hill and water as universal navigation signs. You orientated yourself by the visible church, the rising contour, the stream and bridge. Then, that steeple symbol also reflected the universal power and presence of the Church spiritual. Now that it no longer does, this potent burden of stone and brick is both an embarrassment and a liability. But the Church cannot abdicate all responsibility and hand the problem over to the State, even if the relevant government department were prepared to take it on. The Church of England today is eternally linked to all its previous incarnations by the solidity of architecture: the remote chapel, the parish church, the high Victorian gothic extravaganza, the abbeys and cathedrals. And of course the heritage aspect is not always in accord with the pastoral aspect. The Church wants worshippers; it frequently has to make do with tourists.

  The Church Commissioners do not seek to accelerate the process of church redundancy, except when it has been brought about by pastoral reorganization. They await an approach from the parochial church council, the reluctant admission that it can no longer carry on and keep the church going. Then they step in; the mechanism is set in motion.

  The irony here is that the Church of England's own financial levy, the quota, can be the last straw for a struggling church. This is exacted by the Church Commissioners according to a Byzantine system which varies from diocese to diocese. It descends from the various other methods the Church has seized on for financing its clergy and the services thus provided to congregations: glebe land, which could be farmed to provide an income; tithes – the tenth of the income from land, stock or industry due to the incumbent; and, in the nineteenth century, the revenues distributed by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The Church Commissioners of today are strapped, apparently. They can no longer meet the whole cost of the clergy's pensions and can only contribute towards the cost of the clergy's pay and housing. The quota fills the gap, church by church, parish by parish. Rodhuish has to find over £1,600 a year and it is a hefty burden. For the diocese of Bath and Wells the assessment is calculated annually on a congregational count. Someone must count heads every Sunday, keep a record, and report back. Then comes the bill – in Rodhuish's case, the quid pro quo is the presence of the rector once a month. On other Sundays, a lay reader officiates.

  As one might expect, controversy rages over the quota and who pays how much. Poor parishes and small churches squirm. And should payment be seen as a free-will offering or the response to a perfectly reasonable account for services rendered? Clergy worried by some of the implications of what one might describe as quota rage warn of the dangers of congregationalism.

  They are thinking, I tak
e it, of congregationalism with a small ‘c’ rather than a systematic defection to the embrace of the Congregational Church. But the point is interesting, provocative and makes me realize that my aunt Rachel, loyally C of E all her life, had become in old age a closet congregationalist, infuriated by what she saw as the bureaucracy and detachment of the Church Commissioners. As soon as the lay reader system came into force for Rodhuish she was a convert: ‘What do we need a priest for anyway? I much prefer a D I Y service.’

  It is an ancient enthusiasm. The Congregational Church of today finds its ancestry in the early Christian churches, the small self-supporting sects in which organized religion all began. All that a believer needs is direct access to God within a community of fellow spirits, without the mediation of a priesthood or control by any civil or ecclesiastical power. Before the Reformation, the Anabaptists had seized on this notion of religious liberty. After the Elizabethan Settlement the separatist movement began to gather steam and the Spanish ambassador – presumably rigid with disapproval – reported on one such London group,

  a newly invented sect, called by those who belong to it ‘the pure or stainless religion’. They meet to the number of 150 in a house where their preacher used a half-tub for a pulpit, and was girded with a white cloth. Each one brought with them whatever food he had at home to eat, and the leaders divided money among those who were poorest, saying that they imitated the life of the Apostles and refused to enter the Temples to partake of the Lord's supper as it was a papistical ceremony.