WAGBAI: ST. BOTOLPH'S

            We now follow my father down the sandy path, over the road and up the steps into the church.

            St. Botolph’s is a small, squat building, as churches go.

It has a plain square tower constructed of dark red sandstone, with no spire. Because it is on relatively high ground, you can see almost all of Bedfordshire from its parapets—at least, so I remember. You enter the church either up the stone steps and through the heavy front door to the high-ceilinged porch, directly below the belfry, where the verger pulls on a long, dangling rope to toll the bell for morning services; or through the wooden lych gate on the north side, surmounted by a crucifix, where guests gather on occasion to throw multi-colored confetti or rose petals at newly married couples. The low wall that separates the churchyard from the main road was once topped by a tall iron fence, now stripped off in the early years of the war because the metal was needed for the war effort. All that remained, as of all decorative metal, everywhere, were shiny scars left by the welding torches.

            The church itself, inside, is not one of those imposing Gothic edifices but a more modest Victorian affair. The nave is lined, front to back, with rows of pews—two of them set apart from the others by tall, slim church wardens’ wands, one for the laity, one for the incumbent Rector. Our pew, the Rector’s family’s pew, is a few rows from the front on the Rector’s side of the aisle, in front of Mr. and Mrs. Young’s, the Rector’s churchwarden, and close to the eagle lectern where my father came to read the lesson or the gospel for the day in his sonorous voice; and, behind and above it, the pulpit where he came to preach his Sunday sermons. My sister and I would sit there during the Family Communion service, one on either side of our mother. When I was small, too small to sit still for the whole service, Mr. Brown, the verger, would come and take me by the hand and walk me down with him to stoke the furnace in the nether regions of the church. That was always an exciting treat. Mr. Brown was a nice man.

            On our side of the church, the north, the side aisle was filled with extra rows of pews, mostly unused except on festival days like Christmas and Easter, when even the most errant of my father’s parishioners felt obliged to come to church.  At Christmas time, the east end of this north aisle was where we built the crib with the figures of Mary and Joseph and the shepherds, and the cows and sheep. On Christmas Eve, the baby Jesus was ceremoniously laid there also, in the straw that lined his manger; and, much later, at Epiphany, the three kings arrived, with their gifts of gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

            At the west end of the side aisle on the south side stood the font...

... with its elaborately carved wooden cover, removed only on the occasion of a baptism, when my father would carefully pour consecrated water over the forehead of a screaming baby “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.” At the east end was a small chapel, partitioned off by a mock gothic wooden screen, with its own altar and the carved stone figure of a knight at rest...

... his feet propped up on what might have been a lion, or perhaps a faithful dog. His chest was riddled with small, pitted craters, drilled over the years by the curious fingers of choirboys, I always thought. How else could they have got there?

            From the nave, a few steps led up to the chancel, with lateral pews for the choir on either side and, behind the choir on the south side, an organ that required the assistance of a man pumping a lever that protruded to one side, to operate the bellows that produced the sound. And finally, past the communion rail where the people came to receive the sacrament from my father’s hands, stood the altar and, behind it, the stained glass window with its images of Calvary and the attendant saints and apostles. Peter was one of them, of course, my namesake, with his keys to heaven’s gate. I was given his name because I was born on the Feast of St. Peter’s Chains in the Anglican calendar—which also happened to be my mother’s birthday.

            A door from the chancel led to the vestry, where I watched many times, when I grew old enough to learn to be a server, as my father robed, with the surplice and chasuble over his cassock, the white rope that he knotted around his waist, and the heavily embroidered alb and stole. (I noted earlier, did I not, that my father was “high church”? The only ceremonial appurtenance missing was the incense, and he would have had that, too, had it not smacked of “Rome” to his more Protestant parishioners…) It was here, in the vestry, that I once caught him recording a Holy Communion service in the register and signing himself, with a flourish, “Holy Clothier” instead of Harry L. Clothier, as he would normally do. We had a good laugh about it, father and son, in one of the closest moments that we shared while I was growing up.

            So this was my father’s domain. St. Botolph’s. This was where I would see him standing at the altar week after week, year after year, hands raised in praise and reverence, intoning those words of the services that became so familiar to me as a child, as distant from the small boy in the congregation as was God Himself.