AUNTIE JOYCE was my mum’s elder sister, by a few years. She was born “out of wedlock” in 1909, when my grandmother, Ellen, was 17, as the results of what we might now call a date rape. Ellen was sent away to a house for wayward girls, where she was put into service, and Auntie was raised by her grandparents, and called them Mummy and Daddy.
Joyce thought Ellen was her big sister until she was 14 and leaving school. Joyce, too, then entered service, where she stayed her whole working life, except throughout the Second World War, when she ran the canteen at Sidcup police station.
After the war, she became housekeeper for the family of Sir Harold Scott, the primary civilian Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. When she retired, in 1968, they gave her a Book of Common Prayer in a slipcase; and when she died, in 1994, she left it to me, filled with prayer cards and pressed flowers. Signed by Sir Harold and Lady Scott, it was Auntie’s most precious possession. And she passed on to me not only the book, but a straightforward unwavering faith — light on theology, but strong on certainty, to which I even have aspired ever since. She was a reader — the just one on either side of my family — and, although I’m too clever by half, she can be proud that I even have returned to the religion of my family, Prayer Book in hand.
JORDAN: The Comeback, is the fifth album by Prefab Sprout, released in 1990; it was the last album I purchased on vinyl, and — since I lost access to a turntable a couple of weeks later — also the primary album I purchased on CD. I even have been an enormous fan of the band since their debut album, Swoon, was released in 1984. The songs are written by Paddy McAloon: for my part, certainly one of the nice songwriters of our time. He has been described as a Catholic agnostic, and I suppose I can hear the doubt — but I may also hear traces of a deep faith, which have held me in mine, greater than any numbers of hymns or oratorios. I’m, for good or ailing, a rockist soulboy; only one who’s on the side of Johnny Cash, Al Green, and Nick Cave.
Jordan: The Comeback has an advanced structure, but suffice to say that the last five songs constitute an interesting reflection on what Christianity sets out to do. (“One of the Broken”); the character of forgiveness, and who receives it (“Michael” and “Mercy”); and death and the afterlife (“Scarlet Nights” and “Doo-Wop in Harlem”).
Worship songs don’t must be happy-clappy; in actual fact, the perfect ones hardly pass as worship songs in any respect — unless you listen with faith. If pop groups or rock bands or whatever you need to call them are going to jot down songs concerning the Lord, that is how I like them: slantwise.
IN JANUARY 2020, I signed a contract for a book about my ancestors, One Fine Day. Our roots lie within the Ardennes, and we planned a visit. One of the places I desired to visit was Charlemagne’s Palace Chapel, in Aachen. Despite having been bombed within the Second World War, it stays perhaps essentially the most astounding constructing I’ve ever visited: a “thin” place, to rival Iona.
Just before the trip began, I’d been diagnosed with stage-four prostate cancer. The oncologists told me that I would want to start chemotherapy later within the yr. In the shop at Aachen Cathedral, my wife bought me a set of picket rosary beads to assist my prayer in the course of the long slog of chemo.
Sadly, by the point chemo actually began, I had one other small treasure: an olive-wood holding cross, to which I tied my little string of beads. This had been given to my mum, dying of Covid in June 2020, by the chaplains on the Royal Sussex Hospital, in Brighton. Mum was blind, right at the tip, and the cross was a blessing. My stepdad wasn’t allowed in — none of us were. But the chaplains sat together with her throughout, praying, telling her Bible stories. She died holding this little cross, they told me. And now, as I’m as a result of begin my second round of chemo, the beads and the cross will include me, and I shall tell the beads, including Mum’s cross, as I sit within the chair again, and thank God for hospital chaplains.
Ian Marchant is an writer and broadcaster, and the founding father of Radio Free Radnorshire.
