An Easter story

The old rugged cross

Roy Kerridge

aster bells rang from a church tower. A L'a startled Welsh buzzard flew from its perch on a dead oak and joined its friends who were soaring lazily around a nearby peak. The village, with its shops and little school, was perched high on a Glamorgan- shire hill. Far below, down the jerky com- bination of path and steps known as 'the zigzag', a main road led to the Rhondda Valley, where dark terraced houses filled

every crack and cranny beneath the tower- ing hills, as if they had been poured from a builder's treacle barrel.

Outside the fairy tale cottage where he lodged, near the top of the zigzag, Hugo Tarrant the curate gazed sternly across the valleys. Abruptly the bells of St Michael's stopped and then started again, for the ringers were practising several weeks in ad- vance of the holy day. Hugo's thoughts were not with them. He was a frustrated, ambitious man, who knew that advance- ment lay not in idyllic villages but among scenes of decaying industrial squalor. Amid such deprivation, the Church in Wales, as with the Church of England, richly reward- ed a parson who made a Meaningful Con- tribution, in a Very Real Sense, to the Social and Spiritual Needs of the Com- munity, never forgetting Youth. In short, Hugo coveted a living in the Rhondda whose patron was his bishop, and as the

bells rang, he wondered how to make a good impression, If he seemed a little old for a curate who had entered the Church A from university, by way of a theological college, it was because he had made a false start in life in the Church 0' England, at a London parish where West Indians lived. In those happy days of the early Seven' ties,, f the and L o nd London dclergymen found n d a were n new role . busily running theatre centres full of exclu" young people, many of Caribbean descent' Cathedrals were being turned into conceLt halls, their mediaeval doorways marked Stalts, A seats, B seats and so on, the seats, in question being made of plastic. Fir ,e; with a new sense of purpose, deans scurried up and down holding rolls of tickets. Hug° had been exhilarated by this headY ar mosphere, for then as now, he felt great loyalty for the Anglican church, being lost ,. old enough to remember its beginnings wttu the Honest to God debate and an arch bishop being interviewed by Adam Faith' Loyal churchman though he was 1419,. had had misgivings about his vicar, 1°' Canon Gould seemed a little too fond uf_ith,ef young coloured boys who formed a thtrur the congregation. After services, and before the evening's play had begun, the einirc'- men (who attended each other's PriDdif- tions in rotation) would stand around ping wine and talking in loud secis congratulatory voices, while the lads hovered round them deferentially and glasses. 'There's a big do at the end of the month,' Hugo's vicar had told hint one fateful day. 'The bishop and the arcIje deacon will be there. Dramatise °IL African folk tales and get the theatre

to

with trays them. You'll find some books in the vest"ci Change everything to sound African, a,,a„, athat'll n g e make ttehae hem h into folk yt ales. Errol! uu Errol, a good-looking though silebate youth from a children's home, was t re vicar's current 'slave', as the ult. sophisticated actors and actresses Put .,e These unfortunate actors, though quite English in their ways, were confined reasons of colour to the 'black theatre a'srun by sundry vicars with the aid of clive_1:6 grants. Dismally, Hugo had sat down alio tried to make a three-act play for a Y°Ijid Bcliuybtonaudience out of the works of

off

The play, as it happened, had gone very well, despite the complaints of the peed formers. However, the bishop recogtusall Noddy and the Wicked Golly in spite of ,ti_ Hugo's alterations. A committed .°"'Ics racist, who condemned children's 1)0° right and left, His Lordship had turned on the unfortunate Hugo in a rage. In the heat of the moment, the ruffled Hugo had tried to denounce his own vicar for sodomy, and there had been a terrible row. Bishop and vicar were thick as thieves, and no revela- tion could shock or part them. Hugo had to flee to his impoverished county family in Monmouthshire and start all over again in the Church in Wales. Throughout the cen- turies, the Tarrants had been skilled in turn- ing English or Welsh as the tide of affairs demanded.

After being set the test of existing for three weeks in Cardiff with no money so as to identify with the poor, which he did by sPongeing off a group of ex-university squatters, Hugo began his new career.

Old Father Williams, incumbent of St Michael's, was 'rather near the spire', as he himself put it. To differentiate his Church from the 'hordes of chapels' in the valleys, he favoured the glittering panoply dRome, with bells ringing, censers swing- g and incense swirling out around the week figure of the Virgin. A wooden dove, spended from a chain, hung from the r001 beams. Father Williams was a kindly man, and despite himself, Hugo took to his new surroundings. The elderly vicar had started life as a Rhondda miner, though his port-thickened urbane English accent, Hugo felt, seemed to throw such an advan- tage away.

•

uAnd this is a great pity, one feels, h,ecause • • .' was a typical phrase of 'Italian's's. Impatient with such company, an with the sleepy pace of village life only lid mitigated by various scandals, the „,''r),tiog curate's eyes turned to the valleys ''Ilere life was 'real' and the Church had work to do. The mines were closing, and Patches of abandoned pitheads and railways scarred the valleys. Where an army of glen had once walked to work each morn- fitr°& a van now collected one or two miners the every second street and took them to e, one mine that was still working. -The coal has run out, so the Church stet) in!' Hugo told the vicar one even- ' g, in dramatic tones. wilfiamsYou'll be in difficulties there, dear boy', opined. 'Everybody down there in the valleys is chapel and they hate the 2,,,hurch. I remember when Parsley — was it iarsley? had that church down there that You're so keen on, St Beuno's. There ha a fiery chapel fellow, Heaven Griffiths called him, spelled HEFIN. He was giwa YS trumping up false charges against a`ue Church, Well, Heaven's brother died, though he had been Chapel, Heaven re-firted our people to bury the man. Parsley anPed. very properly I always maintain, lieaven and some of his strongarm men Triply broke into the churchyard at night, That's their own grave and buried the fellow. nitat's the kind of people you're dealing userill' I Well remember what my dear wife co t° saY. I first met her at one of the big vvnferences we used to have at Llandrindod ells, where all the nice Welsh girls used to

go to snaffle themselves a promising curate. I well remember — well, actually, I've forgotten.'

Hugo sighed, while his vicar snored. They were sitting at tea in the cottage where Hugo rented a room from a kindly old Celtic-harpmaker. Also a woodcarver, Mr Lloyd had turned his home into a Gothic dolt's house of cupboards with win- dows, alcoves, unexpected shelves, pointy- arched doorways and other delights. Mr Lloyd's old mother, a cherished member of the family, sat in the corner and knitted, sure of her importance and usefulness. Other Lloyds could be heard clinking in the kitchen, and another visitor, Evans the Cats, drank his tea noisily. (Evans had a cat-kennels with rows of wood-framed cages by the side of his mountain cottage. Most of the cats had escaped and moved in- doors, along with the white ducks who wad- dled in and out of the tumbledown stone building.) Through an open window, its sill painted pale grey, Hugo could see young Alwyn, the cheeky young harpmaker's ap- prentice, planing away at his bench, the beams above him hung with rows and rows of the gilt bodies of unstrung harps. Some

of the frames had ships' figurehead-type ladies on them, accentuating the feminine curves of the instrument.

'It's a very old musical instrument is the harp, deriving from the bow and arrow', old Lloyd would tell everybody.

Hugo sensed a certain peace and orderliness in this household, where a cat (not one of Evans's) purred in its sleep in a tall Victorian armchair with a brown cover. 'Complacency', Hugo termed it, a state of mind he himself would never be able to at- tain until he possessed that church in the Rhondda, which was now without an in- cumbent. A service would be held there at Easter by Williams, who always grew ambitious at this holy time of year when the entire collection could be kept by the vicar every time the plate went round. The bishop's pet archdeacon, a talent scout, would be attending, so Hugo felt it would be a good time for a coup. Uniting church and chapel, perhaps in a joint service, would be a marvellous accomplishment.

It was a dark April morning in a Rhondda village. Rain hurtled down from the grey lowering clouds that hung over the hills, Nature's answer to industrial smog. Unfor- tunate souls who still worked in the mine struggled down a long and narrow street, an almost unending strip of stone terraced houses, two up and two down. The Coal Board van was parked at the bottom of the hill, and to reach it the men had to run the gamut of torrents that spouted with sudden fury from occasional gaps between the dwellings. Rivers swirled along the road, with gurgling drains occasionally visible upon their cobbled beds. Sometimes roof gutterings snapped and drenched the startl- ed sheep who pressed against the sides of the buildings, their fleeces already waterlog- ged. A gleam of sunrise appeared as a white sheen on slate roofs far away.

Several hours later, the unemployed began to stir themselves. By now the rain had become a mere drizzle and coal fire smoke poured from most of the chimneys. The door of number 320 opened and a tall young man hobbled out and surveyed the scene. It was Cowboy; a former miner who had lost a leg in a pit accident. Since then he had taken to drinking heavily, and now his fiery red features and ragged blonde moustache made him look like a parody of a mad old colonel, wounded and embittered in some long-ago war. Lighting a cigarette, Cowboy stood at the top of the road surveying the world. Slowly the clouds lifted from the hills and a watery sun emerg- ed. As if on cue, the radio in the kitchen began to play songs by local musicians, and a rich Welsh voice full of yearning sang 'If I Could See the Rhondda One More Time'.

Tears came to Cowboy's eyes, and he put on his cracked reading glasses in case anyone noticed. Through the mist he gazed on the vista of rooftops broken by long- deserted chapels locked away behind iron railings painted a bilious brown. Calling goodbye to his mother, Cowboy loped down the road to the paper shop. From there he would visit the public library where old men in cloth caps and boots sat reading the Morning Star. Then he might look in on the Unemployed Evangelical Centre. When the children came home from school, he and his mates would amuse themselves by teaching the youngsters the arts of kazoo- playing and throwing batons in the air and catching them. Every year, on Good Fri- day, the village held a Children's Jazz Band Parade. Kazoos, penny whistles, toy drums and trumpets and combs with paper made up the instruments. Street competed against street, and the grown-up organisers were usually members of the many different political drinking clubs that abounded in the locality.

At the other end of the valley, Hugo drove rapidly towards St Benno's, his mind full of plans for reconciling church and chapel in time for the Easter service. When Father Williams spoke out against the miners' unions, claiming that the strike of 1926 had ruined coal forever and that strik- ing miners were sent food parcels from Moscow, posted at Southampton" by Rus- sian sailors, Hugo scoffed openly. Yet he swallowed Williams's tales of thriving chapels hook, line and sinker, without realising that they belonged to a forgotten age. Speeding past one deserted chapel after another, waving in an ecumenical way at jovial skinheads who were painting slogans on walls, he eventually reached St Beuno's vestry. Sure of his freehold, he had obtain- ed a key, and proposed to use the musty room as the base for his bishop-impressing efforts. He had written a 'Dear Bishop' let- ter explaining what he was going to do. On Good Friday he would lead a procession of church- and chapel-goers and their children, symbolically starting at the fur- thest chapel in his parish and leading the way to the church. The local school had promised to send a contingent of recorder- players, and Hugo himself would lead the procession holding an enormous wooden cross.

Such a cross, once denounced as papist, had long lain unregarded in the corner of the vestry. Hugo decided that if the gild- ed figure of Our Lord were removed, the cross would be ecumenical and suitable for his purpose. Seldom a man of action, he puffed and sweated, his face as red as Cowboy's, as he banged away at the Son of Man with a hammer. At last Jesus came off, and Hugo threw Him in the corner. Wiping his brow, Hugo returned to the car and consulted a list of addresses. Children, yes. Unemployed Evangelical Centre, yes, but first he must go to the Christian Bookshop and pick up some literature.

The bell of the tiny shop rang as Hugo entered. Modern tracts, mostly illustra- tions, glared from every shelf. Some show- ed pop-eyed cartoon figures, others bright potato-cuts, still others were of matchstick men. Posters and calendars showing spaniel puppies, kittens and lakes in Canada hung on the walls, with short texts superimposed over them in gold lettering. In the back room, the two partners, Jones and Perry- Evans, discussed business amid a heap of Jesus T-shirts.

`That new wholesaler in Birmingham,

The Spectator 21 April 1984 between you and me, he's nothing but a pig.'

`Talking of Birmingham, your wif knows about your fancy piece there. I e, her crying and she told me.' heard

'Hush, Perry-Evans, I hear the shop bell, It is the Lord's work we are doing, after au' man. I'm saved already, in any case. Ogl- ing, sir! Ah, it's young Mr Tarrant from S Michael's, come by yere for his Ben Again.' WI" unaware of the sarcasm his sinooth-iow,led, some reason he believed that the Ben Born-

Hugo greeted the merchant affably, features and

plummy voice inspired. rdi Again tracts, printed in California, had all enormous appeal for youth. FondlY he chose one with a picture of the redoubtable Ben, a cartoon character with bulbous eYes and nose and long hair, his face covered to lipstick kisses. The caption read: 'Christi° dating can be real groovy fun, says Born-Again. Read about it inside, folks' d Gravely, the two partners suPPresse tphaeriard,leaupgrhotgerramasmHeugo outlined his Easter 'It will be the ruin of him, with the Church bigwigs there and all,' Jones sit/A after the curate had left. 'The miners art' the children won't let a thing interfere wittl their jazz band, and all the chapels are closed.' Two hours later, Hugo felt the full foree of his predicament. Chapel padlocks weir" ` rusted shut, and children and parents 1110,(1 excuses or pretended to be out. This wow be another fiasco, like the one in London' but with no second chance, Why had "st been so confident? The small partY of 10 tell him eunirn anything. been too overawed By now it was late afternoon. Hugo had reached a straggly, partly-denaolishe", end of the village, at the bottom of the lit near the site of the disused mine. He stood behind a terrace, facing rows of backYartls with stone walls and tiled coalhouses.

A pretty girl of eight solemnly bounced a ball against the side of a house and

` sang Roll me over, in the clover' in a Pur.et: beautiful voice. Suddenly, she saluted it pagan zeal as a magpie flew past. The flan:" mering ceased, to be replaced by sweardl as the hammerer hit his thumb and blamed the Tories. With a sigh, our persecuted her° looked at his watch and made for /ice, Unemployed yed Centre not far B from reality The Unemployed Centre was in the tiny front room of Perry-Evans's ho.use, in Treorchy Street. While the evangelical of ifs formerho m e wcahsaipne chapel-goers. use efora rs worker toiled at his vineyard, or bookshaY: fellowshIP. money in the drinking club, Cowboy sat trid `house an easy chair resting his wooden leg 81.1 listening to his uncle, a sunburnt, whit Book of Ezekiel.

haired retired miner, reading from the were

'I have seen the chapels when they full,' the old man concluded. 'Now they ar

spent all his just dry bones as Ezekiel found. But ear/

those dry bones live? Never mind, boy. Whatever will be, will be. I remember when My old father was alive, I'd knock at his door and say "In my Father's house are many mansions". "Come in, boy," he'd

i

say in that gentle voice of is. "Come in, boy.', When Perry-Evans returned, the meeting broke UP and a snooker table was un- covered for the unemployed. One or two employed young miners, their shift ended, Popped in for a game with Cowboy. Just as they were about to begin, the door opened and Hugo breezily entered with a cry of Smashing day, now?' that belied his inner turmoil. Everyone groaned inwardly except perry-Evans, who groaned outwardly and scurried off to make a pot of tea. Keen to recruit the young men to his Cause, Hugo took the opportunity to give a snort sermon.

No doubt you're wondering "Who is this i

.odd-looking character, and why is he talking to us?" ' he truthfully began. 'My better than any of you. Why, you'd run .screaroing from the skeletons in my cup- b seoard! Yet I joined the Church becau I was fascinated by the interaction between People

at the At no time is this more evident than feast of Easter.'

After outlining his plans for the parade, 'lug°, with a fixed smile, handed each Y°,ung man a copy of Ben Born-Again. _ don't disbelieve in God until I hear s_orneone like you telling me about Him,' to-.°Nyoy remarkedcandid puzzled ne b that marked him in Hugo's, eyes as a Potential Easter Parader Aweek later, with Good Friday on the morrow, Hugo's plans were still in cisartaY. In desperation he sought out oWboy in the latter's favourite drinking

club. Perhaps he could turn the Parade into March of the Unemployed. In very un-

familiar country, Hugo blinked in disbelief at the rows of drinking clubs ascending a steep their rusty red and yellow signs Club' Marxist in the rainstorm: Karl Marx Social Marxist Working Men, and last of all, Cowboy's Mandan Club. Hugo found himself in a shabby bar con- werted Years ago from a private house. It as Packed with rough, tipsy men far removed from the intellectual Marxists tlugo had met at theological college. Some Played darts, others drank deeply, and most t`uhcal,ght no more of Marx than revellers at However, King's Head think of the king's head. ,„.9wever, someone suggested that Cowboy -tight be upstairs at the 'meeting'.

Where rows of solemn miners, large hands wooden their knees, sat as if mesmerised on chairs, listening to a tape recorder. A, Union leader stood gravely by, ready to i''..s.natlge the tape, which was spinning -,-Lure on out a ution ofevoi dialectical materialism and the history from religion to revolu- Ipti. The pathos of miners placing such lost in the rotating god of the tapes was (1st on Hugo, who broke the spell by calling

Cowboy's name. `Later, man, later!' the embarrassed scholar shouted.

'Be quiet!' a Communist snapped loudly. `Why did you ask this man here? He's not a member!'

'If it's more Ben Born-Again, don't bother!'

Cowboy said, and instantly felt ashamed. Hugo fled, and Cowboy and Tony got drunk together. Soon they con- cluded that Hugo's appearance had been a deliberate insult. At midnight, the two men lurched past St Beuno's. `Why did he show me up like that?' Cowboy roared. Leaning on his friend, he kicked a small Gothic door, which broke open. 'Here's that cross he wants for his parade, look. Help me, Tony. I'll show him once and for all. We'll carry the bloody thing up to hilltop and throw it down on the church roof! Help me, man.'

Cowboy's uncle heard the noise, dressed and followed the young men up the sloping path to the hills.

'Be reasonable, that's a holy cross you have there,' he remonstrated. So they com- promised by standing it up in a post-hole left by the Forestry Commission.

Next morning, not only the worshippers at St Beuno's, but almost all the village stood amazed to find a tall cross standing firmly upright on the crest of a hill overlooking both church and chapel. `It's black magic!' cried the pastor of the Salem Chapel. 'Witchcraft!'

In the confusion, the visiting archdeacon vaguely supposed the jazz band was the Easter Parade he had been promised. A car pulled up and Cowboy's uncle emerged, holding a frail, angelic old man by the arm. It was Heaven Griffiths, the evangelist who once had set the valleys alight.

`Who put the cross there to bless my old home village?' he quavered.

`It belongs to him,' Cowboy muttered, pointing to Hugo.

`Bless you, boy, you have done a service both for Church and Chapel.'

Faintly, on the wind, the bells of St Michael's could be heard far away. Less than a year later they were to ring at Hugo's wedding and to herald his promising career in the Church in Wales.

To take his mind off his troubles, Cowboy went to evening classes, where he met a nice girl called Maureen (pronounced

Marine). He discovered Goldsmith's Deserted Village and decided that the Rhondda would soon be like that if mines and chapels went on closing.

`Unpractised he to fame, or seek for power', Cowboy read aloud to Marine, in a heavy accent.

'By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour.

For other aims his heart had learned to prize, More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.'

`That's not like our new vicar, the one who's going to marry us,' he remarked. 'He's getting more practice all the time.'