18 JULY, 2021

Dear Harry,

One of the lasting images I have is of you standing at the altar, your back to everything and everyone but God, arms raised in reverence, face raised and catching light from the great stained glass window.

It was a point of pride for you to be a “high” churchman. You delighted in the robes, the rituals of the church, the solemnity of its ceremonies. You loved the candles, the decorative accoutrements, the flowers in their tall vases standing near the altar. You would have used incense if your more conservative parishioners had not objected that it “smacked of Rome.” Roman Catholicism (you insisted on the difference between Roman and Anglo-Catholicism) was still deeply suspect in the English countryside, with its burden of centuries of prejudice and fear. I guess since that dreadful Henry ruled the land and outlawed Papism!

You celebrated two communion services every Sunday: a simple, no-frills half-hour Holy Communion early in the morning for the more conservative faithful; and at ten o’clock your favorite Parish Mass (yes! You insisted on the Catholic word Mass) with all the bells and whistles. This was the communion service for families, for the rest of us, and it included lots of hymns and chanted versions of the Introit, the Confession, the Kyrie, the Gloria.

The Parish Mass included, too, your weekly sermon from the pulpit. How hard you worked at them! For days we children had to tiptoe around your study, always sacrosanct, while you prepared those sermons, writing them down in blue ink on special pads with your Parker fountain pen, in a scrawl that was always unintelligible to anyone but yourself. You put heart and soul and mind into every word—so much so that I came to believe, along with my mother, I’m sure, that they contributed enormously to the pain that devoured so much of your life.

We’ll talk about that later. Meantime, the Parish Mass was the main course of your Sunday feast of services. If Holy Communion was the hors d’oeuvres, the dessert, at the end of the day, was Vespers, the Evening Service, with its psalms and solemn ending as the day turned into night. No robes, for Vespers. Just the black cassock and the narrow white clerical “dog” collar, betokening your high church allegiance. The deeper your collar, as I recall, the more Protestant your faith.

I wonder if you ever thought what it might mean to a very small boy, not old enough yet to even be an altar boy, sitting with his mother and sister in the Rector’s pew, a few rows from the front, looking up through the chancel to where you stood, arms raised, as I remember you, your presence haloed by the glow of multicolored light from the stained glass window? What it meant to a small boy to look up to the pulpit and watch his father preach the word to an attentive congregation, or read from the Bible at that great eagle lectern? How small it could seem? How insignificant? How much in awe a little boy could be? How unreachable you seemed?

And then of course there were those times when I was just bored and wriggly, when Mr. Brown, the Verger, would notice my discomfort and come forward quietly, seriously, to take me by the hand and lead me back to the great church porch, and from there, down the cold stone steps to the crypt below. Once there, he’d crank open the heavy iron door to the furnace, where the fuel burned hot and red, and have me help him stoke the flames with new shovelfuls of coal.

Respectfully, Peter