Three Dont Tango 13

It was one of those days when mother insisted on us all going to church. "You ought to go sometimes you know."
I could have asked her why, but there wasn't much point in getting into that one. Ann stayed home to do the lunch, but the children got spruced up, and we walked up the hill.
There were half a dozen adults  already seated in the draughty building, and about ten children. They sat at the front, as if consigned to some special pen, while the vicar spoke the service carefully to them. We adults at the back didn't really count, we had just made sure the kids arrived safely, and would make sure they all got home again after the ceremony, but we served no further purpose.
The vicar's dog sat on the cold stone floor, then got bored, and walked, or rather hobbled, slowly up to the altar rail, sniffed at one of the metal supports, then sat down on a red piece of carpet and scratched himself vigorously. The kids giggled, but the vicar remained unmoved.
I suddenly woke up. Everybody was standing. I scrambled to my feet as the wheezy strains of the organ stammered into the first hymn. The vicar had his violin clamped beneath his chin accompanying the organist.
At one end of the church the breathy sounds of the organ grunted and wheezed; its player so ancient and decrepit that his fingers often made two or three stabs at the keys before he had worked up enough poke to get them to hold the note, so that the sound that wafted down to our ears was a strange vibrato, mixed with double hits.
At the other end of the church was the vicar, with his violin tucked under his chin, scraping away, sometimes in tune, sometimes a trifle flat. At his feet, the dog had curled up across one black shoe.
In the middle was a sea of squeaky children's voices, all out of key, and most of them way out of time.
To the rear of this cacophony mother and I held our handkerchiefs to our mouths, trying to sing amid a flurry of giggles.


Later in the year we went down to Mells for the midnight service on Christmas Eve. The church was beautifully decorated.
There was a certain charm about holding a midnight service in a church lighted solely with candles. The effect was very romantic, and eerie in a nice way. The shadows flickered wildly. Great trees of stone columns disappeared into the dark of the upper regions, and their alter egos stretched across the people in the pews below, wavering with the draughts. Here and there one could see a sudden splash of red and white where a couple of fortuitously placed candles lit up a particular Christmassy pattern.
The church was full. The vicar came out and told us we would start with a hymn. His dog slowly trailed after him and sat down on a kneeling pad in front of a small altar set in the central aisle of the nave. The organist started up with a stirring sound. No weak fingered stabbing here. The vicar picked up his violin from one of the choir stalls and began to play. The dog gave a sudden single yap, and everybody looked round, but the dog was fast asleep.
The congregation started singing lustily, and the sound roared around the columns until we reached the end of the first verse. Everybody knows the first verse to almost all the carols, but the words of the second verse are usually an unknown quantity. Unfortunately the candles were spaced so far apart that very few could read the words, and the singing ebbed and flowed according to how many people could remember the odd phrase or two.
There were mother and me peering at the words on the page, muttering through the song by the light of a candle flickering ten paces to our left, while surrounded by a whole host of folk wearing bulky overcoats, scarves and woolly hats.
A certain element of the congregation had their hankies out again. Certain persons were not taking this matter as seriously as the event ordained. A certain amount of giggling was mingling with the hymn.
At last the hymn ended, and a murmur arose throughout the church. There were a couple of high pitched giggles followed by much shushing, and everybody sat down. The vicar was carefully prodding the dog, as he now wanted to kneel before his little altar in the middle of the nave and say a few words to God; but the dog would not be moved. There was a long drawn out wheeze from the hound, that sounded like half snore, half sigh. The vicar compromised and knelt on the stone flags, but this led to certain grave problems. Now he couldn't reach to see the prayer book. He lifted the book off the altar and held it close to his face, but there were no candles in that part of the church. Being a vicar of long standing he suddenly broke off in the middle of this prayer which he didn't know and couldn't see to read, and went into a couple of well-known prayers. He put the book back, and went on to auto-prayer. Then we were back on our feet struggling to find the next hymn.
There we were in the semi-dark all um-ing and la-ing as best we could in one great sound, with the mighty organ thundering around in the cavernous dark above us. Everyone was praising the lord, most of us in a very unconventional way, some of us still actively giggling, with a certain gay abandon now, and the joyous sound rose through the columns, from the patchy candlelight to the heavens, while in the centre aisle an ancient hound snored into the night.

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