Or Forever Hold Thy Peace

Even in these straitened times I celebrate more funeral services than I attend, so going to one today was an infrequent event, especially when it took the form of a requiem mass for a priest. It's a bit poor form to snap away in a funeral service itself so here is a photo of the inside of the church: out-of-the-catalogue suburban Anglo-Catholic with everything you might expect but no more and no sign that much has changed since about 1950, apart from the altar being moved forward only so far as it needs for the celebrant to stand behind it. Canon Martin found that quite congenial in his retirement: as his son said in the eulogy, he had strong opinions about how dreadful the modern world and the modern Church were, and recent events provided him with plenty of material to work on. I knew he was a carpenter in his spare time, making a set of turned wooden candlesticks and a cross for one of his churches so the nice metal ones could be packed away and the church left open, but the story that he made a maypole for one of his parish schools was new to me.

Although he had long since moved away from the sites of his ministry, which were all in this diocese, I discovered Canon Martin through a couple of Swanvale Halt worshippers who had been parishioners of his in the past - in fact Simon, who occasionally plays the organ for us, faithfully visited him every few weeks. I went to see him a couple of times while I was researching Anglo-Catholicism in the area and found myself trying to dissuade the 91-year-old from going up the ladder into the loft to find his cuttings albums and wait until his daughter visited instead. 

Eventually I came up with my draft and sent him the parts based on information I'd drawn from our conversations. After some weeks I managed to get out of him the information that I'd got some of the chronology muddled, and we should speak again. For months I attempted to sort out a date: he was sick, then had a family wedding, then this and that. He said he'd written something which made me slightly concerned he saw the project differently from the way I did. And then the meeting never took place: he was taken ill, went to hospital, and never recovered. So although I think I'd excised any matter involving confusion I would never know what I might have got wrong, I told Simon. 'Don't worry', he answered, 'neither will anyone else'.