Family Business

I think perhaps this posting shouldn't be here. Maybe it’s too personal. It’s not about the Diocese of Peterborough. It has no connection to the Church of England – not directly. But this story finds itself in the long narrative, because I could have been reporting to you from somewhere out in the country near Corby, but instead I’m in what was once called North West Kent. And secondly because today I find myself in a different role. I’m a needy, importuning customer/consumer, like others I come across in the visitor books of Peterborough churches . It’s March 8^th, and fifty years ago to the day my mum died of a metastasising breast cancer.  It was a long and arduous road to death. She was forty seven, my dad a few months shy of fifty. I was seventeen, and an only child. Today I want to heal some memories.

 The drive from Northampton to Erith is unpredictable. If the motorway gods are unhappy it can take three or four hours, but I arrive in Northumberland Heath an hour early, and so drive down the narrows of Brook Street to Erith cemetery. I park next to the office in the western part and peer through the windows to see if anyone’s there. Yellow dungaree’d Mick materialises behind me and asks if he can help. I explain I’m looking for the grave of my paternal grandparents. He puts in a call, kindly Jo looks up a ledger and tells me the grave’s number is DD 118. Mick takes me into the middle of the cemetery, and we find William and Isabel. I haven’t been here for nearly sixty years, but the grave is roughly where I imagined. It’s not in great condition. I can just about make out the names on the low surrounding kerb. The concrete on the top is failing, and there’s a small hole in one corner, revealing the void underneath. This state of affairs is a bit near the knuckle.  I’ve recently expressed myself forcibly to fellow-parishioners about the state of the War Memorial in Weston Favell. A couple of years ago it was given Grade 2 status, and there’s been considerable enthusiasm for cleaning it, jacking it up and generally giving it a botox and blow-dry. I’ve taken the opposite view – memorials are what they are, and should be allowed to fall into dignified decay, unless there’s a health and safety issue. But - of course - I don’t feel at all the same about something with the name Cross on it.

 William died before I was born. Isabel knew me briefly as a baby before she too passed away, in 1952. William, so my aunt says, could be a difficult man. So could my dad. So, I’m assured by my family, can I. Isabel was by all accounts kindly and emollient. She gave birth to five sons, so in such a testosterone-filled household, she probably had no choice. I wander the cemetery’s eastern half, and look out towards the just-visible Thames across the old gravel workings, now given over to landfill. I reflect on the rightness of my grandparents being buried together. The ashes of my parents are twenty miles apart, which in retrospect seems a poor reflection of the love they had for each other.

 John meets me outside Northumberland Heath’s Baptist church in Belmont Road. It’s thirties’ red brick looks much the same as it did, just a little more weathered, like all of us. John is sporting a ‘Bob Marley:  Revolutionary!’ baseball cap. He’s a little hard of hearing. I think his wife Grace, who looks after church bookings, has briefed him, but he still carries a faintly puzzled air. I’ve had a bit of difficulty setting this up. An e-mail to the pastor remains unacknowledged after three or four weeks. And Grace and I only made final contact two days ago, after some hiccups. Well, I suppose the request was unusual.

 John lets us in, and I take in the surroundings. The art-deco pews went long ago, to be replaced by nice blue cushioned chairs, ecclesiastical space-for-the-use-of. The communion table has moved forward, and the area over the baptistery is now a concert platform. There’s a drumkit in one corner, and sundry amplifiers, and a keyboard, the usual kind of thing. In the early nineteenth century there were occasional tussles between clergy and gallery bands. The bands would sometimes get out of hand, and the clergy had a job shutting them up: the musicians had come to think of worship as ‘their’ prerogative. And then someone invented automated barrel organs, and the clergy saw a chance to wrestle back the initiative – or so the story goes. It helps to have worked in the pop/rock business to understand the potentially dangerous significance of ‘worship bands’. It’s extremely difficult not to make the music about ‘me, me, me’. Its extroverted nature and the secular model draw attention to the ‘performer’, however hard he/she tries to give God the glory. Choirs and organists aren't by any means immune from this kind of thing, but at least, even in American evangelical churches, we tend to put them in funny furbilowed clothes so they don’t get too uppity. Just like the clergy.

 

Behind the band kit is a grand piano. It doesn’t sound too bad, so I work with that. For my mum, and with John (who has tactfully settled himself two thirds back) as a congregation, I sing. Firstly, ‘O Rest in the Lord’ from Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah’, which she sang more than once as a solo in services, when she was already quite unwell. I imagine she was very scared and uncertain, and the music was a way of shoring up her faith, as it would be for me too. Another piece Mum sang, though with whom I can’t remember, was the ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ duet from The Messiah. I may even have accompanied that. In private she would sing a ditty from the CSSM chorus book. ‘Why worry when you can pray/Trust Jesus, he’ll find a way/Don’t be a doubting Thomas/Rest solely on his promise/Why worry, worry, worry, worry/When you can pray.’ I do not sing this for her now, but instead ‘Great is thy faithfulness’, which is a hymn which carries great personal meaning, with its triumphant couplet ‘Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow/Blessings all mine with ten thousand beside...’ I can’t remember whether Mum liked this, or which hymns were sung at her funeral. I was too shell-shocked. But I do know it was sung when we said goodbye to her mother, Ella May.  I read from John 20, describing Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the empty tomb and the gardener, and though I’ve managed to stay focused and dry-eyed through the music, my voice cracks as I read the account of the disciples’ encounter with resurrection. I finish by singing my own version of the Nunc Dimittis.

 

And that’s it. It sounds trivial and grudging to say I’ve done my duty, but I have. I'm so grateful for what my mum gave me: a joy in life, a desire to smile even in adversity, a delight in music and words, and a faith. I wish she could have seen what the last five decades have brought, and that she could have met Sue and Matt. I thank John and bid him and the church goodbye. I was dedicated here as a baby (not christened!). I struggled my way through Sunday School here, kneeling on the dirty boards of the hall floor to crayon pictures of Moses in the bullrushes on the little school chair ( no, no, silly – on sugar paper, on the chair!). I learned to cheat my way around an organ here (electronic, primitive and made by ‘Jennings’ from Dartford, who also more successfully made Vox amplifiers with their never-better-emulated tremolo settings). I was baptised here by full immersion. I was grudgingly admitted to church membership too, although because I couldn’t summon up a real ‘conversion experience’, it was made clear they thought I was a second-class Christian. 'Maybe you'll get there one day, lad...'

I harbour no regrets or resentment but it’s quite possible I’ll never come back. The place has changed, and so have I. The memories are good and bad, painful and healing. Nowhere now will you hear the full-throated sound of a congregation packed to the gunnels roaring out, in the aftermath of the Graham crusades, ‘And can it be, that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood...?’ male voices to the fore. The egos of contemporary drums and guitars are in danger of drowning out the corporate expression of the Church.

 I walk the streets for a bit. The houses crowd round the church now. The old Brook Street school has gone, where the great Alan Knott learned his basic wicket-keeping skills. The Pheasant pub, whose predecessor was the oldest inn on ‘The Heath’ has fallen on hard times. The yeasty smell of the bread factory still hangs in the air – it carries the Hovis name now, though I don’t think it always did. The wide open space of the rec is still available for dog-walkers and footballers. Long ago it was the site of the Workhouse, the ‘Spike’ which gave Northumberland Heath its still remembered nickname of ‘Spike Island’. I stroll up Horsa Rd, where Mum and Dad rented their first house together, and on to Emes Road where in a small council house the Hutchins family was raised. If anything it’s a little more upmarket now under private ownership. I pass the cottage hospital where I was born, and then double back to Bexley Road, where in the fifties there was a Co-op with its funny tin tokens and a Woolworth’s too, piles of knickers and bras in an open cabinet for anyone's fingers to sort through, but where now, in the same buildings, can be found tanning salons, tattoo parlours and betting shops. What’s so striking is how close everything is. The Crosses of Hind Crescent lived a literal stone’s throw from the Hutchins. Hospital, school, shops, church were all within the bare three quarters of a mile length of the community. And without television, or cinema, life revolved around the church for many, three or four nights a week, and twice or three times on Sundays. Even the pubs came under the eye of the Church. My dad once told me that he used to hang around their entrances as a young man, not gasping for a pint, but carrying a bible and singing hymns with the Band of Hope.

 

I leave by way of passing the first house my parents owned, at the unfashionable end of Parkside Avenue down towards Slades Green. They didn’t stay there long. They always had leafier places in mind. The place is scrappier now than it was then. Other communities are moving through, aware their sojourn by the railway embankment is temporary. All things must pass.

 

As I drive back up the A2, through Blackwall and round the M25 towards ‘my’ chosen patch I ponder how we can better serve those whose memories and needs draw them back to the places they and their families knew in the past. I’m not sure we’re doing a great job. How many churches have alumni associations, to keep in touch with students as they move away from home?

 And more generally, as all humanity flees from its centre, like a universe exploding from its first nucleus, increasingly isolated in our own individual worlds, yet receiving a confusing multiplicity of messages from those disappearing into the infinite distance around us, I wonder yet again how we can ‘do church’ more effectively. Same old stuff. My mum and dad were for ever asking the same thing, six decades ago.

 

Next time, back in Northamptonshire...

 

In memory: Betty May Cross nee Hutchins: 1921 -1969.