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Scenes from the life of my grandfather, #3
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
My grandfather’s first incumbency was considered ideal for a gifted young clergyman eager to make a name for himself.
The Church of Saint Hetty the Frenetic, Pimlico, had forty-eight thousand names on its electoral roll. Among them were the Duke of Marlborough, the Empress of Japan, Leonard ‘Bolt-Cutter’ Stroughton of Wormwood Scrubs, the fashionable actress Su Pollard and a mysterious individual called Stygron Of The Planet Triskellion who was rumoured to take Communion once every thousand years, with numerous fatalities.
It was a place that got you noticed.
He never forgot the first meeting of his Parochial Church Council. Most of the members were conference-calling from Thailand or Manhattan. Those who were physically present appeared less interested in the discussion than in some unexplained lines of white powder laid out on the table before them. All decisions had to be cleared with the relevant partner at Goldman Sachs.
For a man like Anchovy, who had been found in a wicker basket among bulrushes and brought up by marsh-warblers, it was an immense culture shock.
His first sermon was uncompromising.
‘Four and twenty years ago,’ he declared to a congregation of eight old women, six Chelsea Pensioners, ten Albanian gangsters having discreet conversations with corrupt police superintendents, a few private detectives searching for evidence of marital infidelity and a raving lunatic who’d wandered in off the street claiming to be the Cardinal Archbishop of Sao Paolo, which was never properly proved or disproved as he’d shot his face off in a bungled suicide bid, ‘our forefathers selected bathroom suites in a hue named “Avocado”.’
He let the hideous word hang in the air, like the previous incumbent after he crossed the wrong parishioner.
‘Were they wrong? They were not wrong. They were not blameworthy. They were merely naff!’
Every member of the choir started applauding.
‘They were as naff as a lava lamp in the shape of a Rubik’s Cube! They were even more naff than eating a prawn cocktail while watching Terry and June! They were almost as naff as Gerald Harper opening a Marzipan Eat-In in aid of the Dagenham Girl Pipers!’
In studio apartments in a one-mile radius in every direction, unsuccessful graphic designers stirred in their sleep and rasped their stubble across their bedfellows’ cheeks, dimly aware of a profound spiritual event.
‘And I say to you – that they knew no better! They were victims of their times. They were accustomed to joss sticks, and Michael Barratt on Nationwide, and Little Jimmy Osmond in skin-tight white satin, and pretending to enjoy Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and nylon cravats, and flared dinner suits, and the pointless, sexless, purely geometrical gyrations of Pan’s People!
‘Oh yes,’ and he dropped his voice three and a half octaves, ‘there was an excuse for them. But what excuse could there be for us? For us – unless we go forth from this place and go back to our homes and go up to our bathrooms and wrench from the wall those hateful, despicable, shameful, demonic ceramic tiles in the shade of “Avocado” – the Devil’s OWN HUE!!’
It was a decided success. Parishioners were hopping up to him in the street and congratulating him on it for days afterwards. Victor Lewis-Smith was beastly about it in the Standard but that’s just something you have to live with. Anchovy had made a promising start.
Scenes from my grandfather’s life #2
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