**
Was Meriel Deane a saint? She had saintly qualities certainly, but I tend to think that true saints are less self-conscious about their sanctity, and less disposed to remind you of it. Let us just say that in her eccentric way Meriel was on the side of the angels and leave it at that.
I had been the Rector of Saxford for about five years when she came to our village and I remember clearly the first time I met her. One’s first and last images of a person are often the most vivid. With Meriel, it was the same one: the back of her head. Which was appropriate, I suppose, because she was as distinctive in appearance from the back as from the front.
Every morning I would open the church at seven, say prayers and then go to the Rectory for breakfast. In those days—I am talking about 1964—we were less careful about keeping the church under lock and key. I don’t know whether any of you know St Winifred’s, Saxford? Not very special, but some nice Norman corbels in the porch and a painted rood screen which somehow managed to survive both the Reformation and Cromwell’s iconoclasts. One of the panels has a rather lively depiction of St George and the Dragon on it.
I mention that because one morning in March 1964 when I returned to the church after breakfast I found it to be occupied. A woman was kneeling, very upright, in one of the front pews, directly opposite that painting of St George and the Dragon. She did not move an inch as I entered. She was wearing a coat and skirt of some loosely knit woollen fabric, rather indeterminate in colour, but it was her head which attracted my attention. It was small and neatly shaped; her iron grey hair, obviously long, had been coiled up into an elaborate bun on the back of her head. It reminded me of a sleeping snake.
I don’t know what you think is the correct etiquette when you find someone praying in your own church. I tend to sit down quietly in a pew and wait for them to finish. I read a prayer book and tried not to look at her too much, but she did rather fascinate me. She was formidably motionless: evidence of a disciplined, perhaps rather rigid, piety.
After about five minutes she got up, turned round and smiled directly at me.
‘You must be Father Humphreys, the Rector,’ she said. ‘I am most frightfully sorry. I should have come to introduce myself before, but we’ve just moved in to the Old Tannery in the village and chaos has been reigning supreme. This is positively the first instant I’ve had to myself. I’m Meriel Deane.’ She came forward and shook me firmly by the hand.
I rather liked her. I suppose she must have been in her late fifties. She had a handsome, apple cheeked, sexless face and strangely bright eyes. Her body was tall, spare and without shape; she moved in long, determined strides. She seemed completely unselfconscious, oblivious of the effect she was having on people, like a schoolgirl before her first erotic awakening, but not at all gauche or ungainly. Her voice was an upper class, intellectual bleat, like a Girton professor, easily parodied and in itself unattractive, but not offensive in her because she spoke without affectation.
I had vaguely heard of Meriel Deane and the Philippians, but she filled me in on her work. The Old Tannery was her third Philippian House, and she was going to stay to run the place herself for at least a year. By the end of our first meeting I had offered to take Compline for them at the Old Tannery on Friday evenings and had given her a spare key to the church so that she could go in any time she liked and, as she put it, ‘have a little pray’.
I was soon a regular visitor at the Old Tannery. It was a pleasant atmosphere. The furnishing was rather Spartan—very few easy chairs, rush mats on the floors—but it was always warm and clean.
You might think that the village would have objected to an invasion by this strange woman and her gang of ex-convicts but reaction was very muted. The men who stayed with her were all middle-aged to elderly. One would occasionally see them lumbering about the village, usually in small groups of twos and threes, rarely alone. They bought sweets and tobacco at the local post-office-cum-general-store, but otherwise kept themselves to themselves. They did not go into the pub, having been forbidden it by one of Meriel’s few House Rules. Otherwise, they had little impact on the community.
I do not remember Meriel’s men as individuals. In my memory they all seem to merge into a single generalised portrait. They were big people with simple, troubled faces, and plain, monosyllabic names like Bill and John and Pete. Meriel behaved towards them like a kindly schoolmistress in charge of a class of not particularly bright infants, a treatment to which they responded surprisingly well.
‘They are Life’s Walking Wounded,’ Meriel used to say to me. There was something about that phrase, or perhaps the way she said it, that I did not particularly like. It was just a little smug, I thought. That was the one aspect of her which I found mildly objectionable. She could appear rather pleased with herself; but then she had good reason to be.
I say that all these Johns and Bills and Petes were indistinguishable in my mind, but there was one very notable exception. This was a man whom I shall call Harry Mason, and he was distinctive in every way.
He arrived in the summer of that first year, round about July when the air was heavy and hot and green with growth. I noticed him at once because he was one of the few men who always walked alone around our village.
He was maybe a fraction younger than the average run of Meriel’s inmates, early forties I should say. He was of average height, but thin with spindly arms and legs. He had a very prominent lower jaw and lip, a near deformity which made him look as if he were permanently and joylessly grinning. This Hapsburg trait, combined with a neat moustache and beard, gave him a striking resemblance to the Emperor Charles V, as portrayed by Titian. Had he cultivated the likeness? It is possible, because, unlike the others at the Old Tannery, he was clearly an educated man.
I never knew what he had been ‘in for’; I never asked and I doubt if Meriel knew herself. She had a habit of acting as if her charges had no past and that only the present mattered.
One Friday evening soon after he had arrived I conducted Compline as usual at the Old Tannery. These occasions were not in any way solemn or pompous. We all gathered in the main room and seated ourselves in a rough circle. There was no kneeling or anything like that. The men would often follow the service with a prayer book in one hand and a mug of tea in the other, sometimes slurping it noisily during the pauses. But nobody minded and there was a good deal of chatter and laughter when it was all over. Compline is in any case the most simple and beautiful of services.
The Gospel reading for that evening was from Mark Chapter 5: the possessed man called Legion who dwelt among the tombs and whose Devils Jesus cast out into the Gadarene Swine. It had been in the lectionary for that day, but I remember wishing I had taken thought before and chosen a rather less sinister passage. Meriel read it for us in her clear, high bleat, and it was heard in an unusually intense silence. The customary shuffles and sippings of tea for once were banished.
After it was over normality returned. I was pressed to stay for cocoa and a ginger biscuit, and there was general chat of a not very interesting kind. Meriel was trying to recruit some of the men to go with her in a week’s time to an organ recital at a neighbouring church. There were few takers, and she was being mildly teased about her enthusiasm for such things. While this was going on I had an opportunity to observe Harry Mason, the new resident to whom Meriel had briefly introduced me before the service.
He was standing by the window, apart from the others, looking on but not participating. I saw one of the other men pass him carrying a tray laden with mugs of cocoa. It seemed to me that the man made studious efforts to keep as far from Mason as he could. When it was Mason’s turn to be provided with a cup of cocoa the man did not hand it to him directly but put it on an adjacent table where Mason could pick it up.
Mason noticed that I had observed his tiny humiliation. He picked up his mug and saluted me with it before drinking. I returned the compliment.
A little later in the evening I was aware of him threading
his way across the room towards me. Again I saw how the others drew away from him as he passed and wondered if it was because they knew what his offence had been.
‘ ’Evening, Vicar,’ he said. ‘Enjoying your cocoa?’ There was a touch of mockery in his voice which took me aback. The other men treated me with a respect that bordered on reverence. I tried not to bridle; there was no reason why he should be deferential, so I smiled and nodded.
Mason paused. He appeared to be searching for something to say to me, then a thought came to him. He put his head on one side and said: ‘That story we read from the gospels about the man in the cemetery and the pigs.’ His voice was clear and well produced, in the tenor range, with a slight South London twang.
For a moment I did not know what he meant. It was such an odd way of talking about the story of Legion and the Gadarene Swine.
‘What about it?’
‘Well, let me make it clear, I am personally an atheist, so I have a rather different perspective on these things.’ He paused again, perhaps to study my reaction to his words. ‘But if you want my opinion,’ he went on, ‘I would say that whoever wrote down that story—’
‘St Mark.’
‘—whoever—had got it all wrong.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, for a start, everybody seems to have assumed that this man Legion needed to be healed somehow, wanted to be healed. But that was their assumption, wasn’t it? I mean, suppose he just liked living that way. Among the tombs and that.’
‘Cutting himself with stones?’
‘Yes. All right. Similar to what some holy men do in your church. Don’t they call it mortification? That was his choice.’
‘It’s an interesting point of view,’ I said, turning away from him. I had had enough of this conversation, but Mason hadn’t. He moved uncomfortably close to me.
‘You know why everyone wanted him dealt with?’ he said.
‘No. Why?’
‘It says why in the story. It says they had chained him up several times, and he always broke the chains. So he had strength. He had power. And he wouldn’t fit in. That’s why they wanted to get him. They wanted to destroy his power.’ By this time, though his voice was not raised, there was something nakedly aggressive about his tone. One of the men close by must have become aware of this because he turned round and said:
‘Is this man bothering you, Reverend?’
‘No. No,’ I said. ‘But I really must be going.’
Meriel escorted me to the door. When we were out of earshot of the others, she said: ‘You’ve been talking to Harry.’
‘Yes.’
‘You mustn’t let him bother you.’
To anyone else I might have said ‘he doesn’t’, but you didn’t lie to Meriel. I was silent.
‘He’s a rather more difficult customer than my average, but we’ll soon have him “clothed and in his right mind”, as they say.’ It was an odd choice of phrase, though it would have seemed even odder if it had not occurred in the gospel reading for that night. I wondered if Meriel was trying to tell me something about Mason which she had guessed at but was not quite prepared to admit openly.
My walk back to the Rectory that night was dominated by thoughts of Harry Mason and Meriel. She had exuded confidence in her work, complacency even. I wondered for the first time whether her confidence was well placed.
The following morning I was on my way to the church when I was waylaid by Mason. It was a disconcerting experience because he suddenly emerged from behind a tombstone in the graveyard. I make no claim to psychic gifts, but I have a strong sense of the presence of other people. Like most of us, for example, I usually know when I am being watched. What shocked me about Mason’s appearance was that I had no intimation of his presence until he was there. One moment the churchyard was empty—I was sure of it—the next he was about ten feet away from me standing quite still behind a tombstone and looking at me.
‘I apologise if I startled you,’ he said.
I said: ‘Not at all,’ or something equally foolish.
He then embarked on a long and rather rambling apology for what he had said the night before. I am not quite sure what he thought he was apologising for; except that he seemed to feel that I had been shocked by his unorthodox views. As a matter of fact, I had not. One phrase he used I can remember. He said: ‘I had no intention of offending the sensibilities of a man of the cloth.’ It struck me as oddly ponderous, pompous even, and besides, I don’t know about you, but I have a peculiar aversion to that phrase ‘a man of the cloth’. Whenever it is used I always feel that there is some sort of sneer behind it.
He talked at great length and I found it extremely difficult to disengage myself from him politely. At one point I thought he was going to follow me into the church, but when I opened the church door he backed away. The next minute he was gone.
It seems rather shaming to have to admit it, but when I came out of the church again after about an hour, I felt deeply apprehensive—afraid even—that Mason might be waiting for me among the gravestones. Fortunately he wasn’t.
From that day onwards I was plagued by Mason’s attentions. He never called on me in the Rectory or the Church, but I am sure that he often contrived apparently accidental meetings: in the village, sometimes when I was walking in the fields, but most often among the tombs in the churchyard. Then he would engage me in conversation. I can’t really remember what he said; perhaps I have deliberately blocked it from my mind. Details escape me but I do have a clear impression of always coming away from those meetings the worse for the encounter: distracted, uneasy, drained. But it was not that his talk was wild or evil in any obvious way. Do you know that expressive word ‘witter’? Well, that describes exactly what he did. He wittered at me. He launched on me a barrage of inconsequential chat about nothing in particular, and, what was worse, he constantly invited my reaction to what he said, so I could never switch off.
I once asked him directly why he needed to talk to me so much. I remember his reply distinctly because it was odd, and, for once, concise.
He said: ‘I talk to you, Vicar, because I’d rather not talk to myself.’
When I saw him walking in the village or in the fields I am ashamed to say I would often hide myself so he wouldn’t see me. As a result I was occasionally caught out by my parishioners in undignified positions because I felt a curious compulsion to observe his movements unseen. There was something peculiar about him which struck not only me but others as well.
‘There goes that Mr Mason,’ the villagers would remark, usually with a slight frown, and their eyes would follow him until he disappeared from view. It was as if, one of them observed to me, it was necessary to ‘keep an eye’ on him.
His walk was odd. He moved quickly, taking long strides with his stick legs, his body bent forward, shoulders slightly hunched. It was as if he were hurrying somewhere with a heavy but invisible weight on his back. Occasionally he would take a quick glance to his left or right, but he never seemed to notice his surroundings much, let alone enjoy them.
I felt I needed to speak to Meriel about him, but what was I to say? That he talked too much? That he had a strange walk? Fortunately, I was relieved of this responsibility by Meriel herself who came to see me at the Rectory. We discussed various churchy affairs. She even canvassed my opinion about a religious controversy which was then raging, but I could tell that something else was on her mind. Her usual stillness—a unique blend of rigidity and serenity—was absent. At last she blurted it out.
‘I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to have to ask him to leave.’ I asked who she meant, but my question was redundant because I knew she would say it was Mason. ‘He’s upsetting the other men,’ she said.
‘In what way?’
‘Nothing violent or insulting. He walks into a room and the atmosphere becomes unsettled. You know me, Rector. I don’t judge. It’s a necessary principle with me: I have to take people as they are. But there is something
wicked about poor Harry.’
‘You think he’s wicked?’
‘No. No. I didn’t say that. I said there was something wicked about him.’
She then started talking about Tibbles, the ginger Tom who kept down the mouse population at the Old Tannery. Apparently Tibbles would rush headlong out of a room whenever Mason entered it, very unaccustomed behaviour for this dignified old bruiser. I thought this was fanciful nonsense, but, all the same, I was very relieved to hear that Mason was going. I felt ashamed at my relief, so I tried to enjoy our conversations when he waylaid me. But he didn’t go. And so the summer passed.
One other thing happened that summer which may be of no relevance at all. We had a Summer Fête and Flower show. It was in its way rather well run—not by me, you understand—and used to attract people from miles around. They were very welcome, but it was an invasion, and some of the visitors could be less than considerate, particularly where parking was concerned. There were, of course, fields set aside as car parks, but some found it easier to park in the village with little regard for the convenience of the locals. On this occasion some particularly inconsiderate persons had put their car directly across the little drive which went up one side of the Old Tannery, and it so happened that Meriel had chosen that day to visit a sick friend thirty miles away. For this she needed to use her battered old Morris Oxford which was in the drive.
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 7
