Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  But my experience of church-going was even earlier. Both my parents had a deep affection for church music, my mother from nostalgia and sentiment, my father because he loved organ music, and they would frequently attend Sung Evensong in the College chapels as well as the services in the Cathedral. I would be wheeled in my pram and left outside the chapel doors (this was an age when mothers had no fear of their children being snatched), or even carried, sleeping, into the chapel. Thus listening to the music and hearing the liturgy of the church were two of my very early and formative experiences and Cranmer’s magnificent cadences seeped into my first consciousness.

  When we lived in the house called The Woodlands on the fringes of Ludlow our nearest church was over the bridge at Ludford. I have only two memories of Ludford church: the tortoise stove which flared dramatically when the wind changed, reminding me of the tongues of fire at Whitsun, and a remarkable prayer book which had been left in the pew in which we normally sat. It had heavy brass clasps which I would discreetly click open and shut during the service, and one of my earliest temptations was the wish somehow to conceal the prayer book and take it home with me. Surely it wouldn’t be stealing. I should be returning with it every Sunday evening. It was the first object I remember wanting to possess with real passion.

  I have a memory, too, of Ludford Sunday school. All the children were given a card with blank spaces and each week we were handed a coloured sticker of a biblical scene to fix to the appropriate space. I had no choice about attending Sunday school but, even if I had, it would have been important to complete my card without any humiliating blanks. After a common prayer and hymn we would disperse to sit in little groups according to age. Our group had a teacher who must have been extremely inexperienced; perhaps she was filling in for someone more orthodox. Certainly she spent little time in telling us Bible stories, but did recount the more lurid examples from Foxes Book of Martyrs, which both thrilled and half-terrified us. I don’t think these gory details of rackings and burnings kept me awake at night, nor did they affirm me as a natural Protestant.

  My mother in particular was naturally ecumenical and had friends who were Roman Catholics and others who were Methodists or belonged to the more esoteric Protestant sects. It was never at any time suggested to me that one form of Christianity was necessarily superior to any other. My mother, indeed, was much in demand as a member of the Talkers Circuit and was frequently asked to address meetings of the Women’s Bright Hour. I can remember being taken with her and sitting, legs dangling, among the female audience while my mother gave comforting and lively little homilies on “Meals in the Bible,” “Journeys in the Bible,” or any other similar theme on which she could hang her gentle moralizing. Mother enjoyed amateur theatricals but had no opportunity to participate except at concerts in aid of the church. I remember a performance of Babes in the Wood which she wrote or produced (probably both) and in which Edward was a babe, and Monica and I gnomes. Then there was the Sunday school dance troupe. Dressed in such costumes as she could improvise, we would perform deeply inauthentic folk dances, prancing uncertainly across the stage while Mother mouthed encouragement and occasional desperate instructions from the piano.

  When we moved from The Woodlands to a tall terraced house in Linney View overlooking the water meadows and close to Ludlow Castle, we began attending St. Lawrence’s parish church, where my father sang in the choir. Here, too, our usual service was Evensong. There seemed, as I remember, to have been a social distinction between Mattins, sometimes followed by Holy Communion, and the evening service. Those who had servants to cook their Sunday lunch went in the morning; those who, like my mother, had to do all their own housework and cooking, usually found it more convenient to go in the evening. But occasionally on special days we would be taken to a Sung Holy Communion and I can remember the great glory of these occasions and my sense that something mysterious and extremely important was happening at the altar, and that, left in the pew with my brother and sister while my parents went up to receive the wafer and wine, I was temporarily deprived of something which one day would be mine also and which I would enter into as I might an inheritance. It was, too, an important Sunday for us when it was my father’s turn to carry the processional cross, the pride of the occasion being somewhat dimmed for me by the terrifying fear that one day he might drop it.

  My mother’s faith was uncritical, unintellectual, simple and sentimental. It provided solace, nostalgia, reassurance and such social life as she enjoyed. She liked us to say our evening prayers at her knee, a practice which obviously gave her satisfaction but which I found acutely embarrassing. I accepted that there must be public prayers in church but felt that private prayer should be a matter between me and God. But religion in our home was never made into a source of guilt. We were made to feel guilty enough, but these were sins against an occasionally terrifying earthly father, not against God. God and fear seemed to me two opposing, irreconcilable ideas. And because my mother in particular took a lively part in church affairs, I never from my earliest age assumed that churchgoers were necessarily morally superior to other people, since experience showed me that they were not. There were the seemingly inevitable disputes at Easter-time and Harvest Festival about who should and should not decorate the altar and pulpit, and my mother voiced her dissatisfaction at always being given one of the darkest windows. There were the usual arguments between the organist and the vicar about the hymns and the music, and the annual church fête and sale of work provoked mutterings about members of the congregation notable for their bossiness. But the church was always there, immutable, unchanging, comforting and secure, and the year given a recognizable shape by its festivals and seasons.

  When we moved to Cambridge we no longer worshipped as a family. My brother gained a place in the choir at Clare College, which kept him busy singing the services on Sunday and attending rehearsals on some weekdays, and my mother attended St. Mary’s parish church. Occasionally I went with her but my school friend and I preferred the smaller St. Edward’s Church, where within two years we were both prepared for confirmation by Father Colin Marr. Looking back, it seems that I took confirmation as very much a rite of passage unaccompanied by any particular spiritual enthusiasm. In those days candidates were not confirmed in their own parish church but together in a large group either in the Cathedral or in a church sufficiently large for the purpose. My best friend Joan and I were confirmed together at St. Luke’s Church in Cambridge by the Bishop of Ely and I remember the massed pews of white-clad veiled girls and, opposite, the boys in their blue Sunday-best suits.

  St. Edward’s Church, in defiance of its traditions, was going through a brief period of High Anglicanism, and we both went to confession before confirmation. Father Colin had suggested that it would be helpful if we listed our sins so that none were forgotten, and I can remember to my chagrin that Joan’s list was twice the length of mine, and my relief at discovering that, whereas I had put down “unkindness to members of the family” as one sin, she had listed her family members separately to produce a far more impressive total. Even so, I felt that my offering was hardly worthy of Father Colin’s attention, a thought which, alas, would not occur to me today. Occasionally our current boyfriends from the Perse or the boys’ grammar school (the word “followers” would be a more appropriate description since we never encouraged them) would attend the morning service in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with us and we would spend much time during the sermon throwing them discouraging and disapproving looks.

  But it was King’s College Chapel which, during these years of early adolescence, provided for me my most meaningful religious experience. Evensong was sung at half-past three on Sundays and in the evening on weekdays, and I would often drop in when cycling home from school. I can recall the solemnity, the grandeur and the beauty of the building, the high, soaring magnificence of the roof, the candle-lit gloom, the decorous procession of the boys of the choir, the order and the beauty of the traditional service.
This, I believed then and still do believe, was what worship should be. I think I probably realized even then that I was in danger of confusing worship of God with a strong emotional and aesthetic response to architecture, music and literature, but it seemed to me that religion could be an aesthetic experience and that God should be worshipped in the beauty of holiness.

  From an early age I have taken little pleasure in sermons; it is the more reprehensible that I have occasionally succumbed to the temptation to accept invitations to deliver them. Special children’s services have always been anathema to me and I greatly deplore the present fashion for rewriting the Eucharistic prayer to make it suitable for children. I must have listened to thousands of sermons during a lifetime of churchgoing, but few have remained permanently in memory. The fault no doubt lies in my arrogance. From childhood I wanted to question the preacher and to engage in discussion, particularly when the points he was putting forward differed greatly from those propounded in the previous Sunday sermon. After all, even in school we could put up our hands, ask a question, seek elucidation of half-understood points. There seemed something unnatural in a whole congregation listening in silence to one person’s voice without the chance to intervene.

  But if as a child I disliked the sermon, I loved the hymns, and this affection has remained with me. The soaring triumph of the processional Easter hymns, the celebration of All Saints’ Day, with the hymn “For All the Saints,” which was my mother’s favourite, and the plangent melancholy of the evening hymns, particularly “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Has Ended,” sung while the church windows darkened and the mind moved forward to the walk through the churchyard between the gleaming tombstones in the evening dusk. Some of my early religious memories are of the hymns and my mother’s rich and overloud contralto and my own piping treble. Some of them still have the power to move me to tears.

  The Church of England in my childhood was the national church in a very special sense, the visible symbol of the country’s moral and religious aspirations, a country which, despite great differences of class, wealth and privilege, was unified by generally accepted values and by a common tradition, history and culture, just as the Church was unified by Cranmer’s magnificent liturgy. There were, of course, varieties of practice and little superficial resemblance between the multi-candled ceremonial, the incense and Stations of the Cross found in the extreme High Church and the simplicities of an evangelical church which could have been mistaken for a nonconformist chapel. But it was possible to attend different churches—on holiday, for example—and feel immediately at home, finding in the pew not a service sheet with a series number, but the familiar and unifying Book of Common Prayer.

  The importance of the Church of England as the national church was perhaps most clearly shown on Armistice Day, when whole communities gathered in their parish church, united in sorrowful remembrance. To be born in 1920, two years after the end of the slaughter of a generation, was to be aware from one’s earliest years of a universal grieving which was part of the air one breathed. Today I frequently hear people and families referred to as being Christian as if they were members of a minority and slightly eccentric sect. In my childhood the great majority of the population, whether or not they regularly attended a place of worship, thought of themselves as Christians, and most described themselves as C of E. The English have always respected and felt a devotion to their national church, provided they are not expected regularly to attend its services.

  My early religious experience, like all the experiences of childhood, has both formed and influenced my subsequent years. I have inherited a love of and devotion to the Church of England which is still strong, although I sometimes find it difficult today to recognize the church into which I was baptized. Much of its former dignity, scholarly tolerance, beauty and order, have been not so much lost as wantonly thrown away, together with its incomparable liturgy. The King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer have both been central to my life and to my craft as a novelist. In particular, the words of the Prayer Book are so much part of my consciousness that I do not need to remember them, search for them or concentrate on them, but can release my mind to enter into that communion with the unseen, unknowable God which I call prayer. I still see myself as a searcher after truth rather than as one confident she has found answers to the great and eternal questions of human existence, not least the problem of the suffering of the innocent, and at seventy-seven I do not think I shall find all the answers now.

  MONDAY, 6TH OCTOBER

  Publication day of A Certain Justice, which was launched at a party given by Faber this evening in Middle Temple Hall. For me publication day is never an unalloyed pleasure. Like several writers I know, I would sometimes like to go abroad incognito and lie low until the fuss is over, returning only when the best and worst are known. But it helps to have a few preliminary good reviews, or the assurance of them, and in this I have been fortunate.

  A Certain Justice is one of the novels I have most enjoyed writing, largely because of my fascination with criminal law and the fun and interest I had in researching the book. It began, as do nearly all my novels, with the setting. I had been to the 11:15 service in the Temple Church, to which I occasionally go when I feel the need to hear Mattins beautifully said in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer and with superb accompanying music. Strolling after the service through the Temple and into Middle Temple Lane, I was struck by the contrast between the peace, the traditions, the history and the ordered beauty of this unique part of London and the appalling events with which criminal barristers daily deal in courts like the Old Bailey. I thought that it would be exciting to bring murder, the ultimate crime, into the heart of this bastion of law and order, striking down a female barrister of the criminal Bar in her own chambers. At once, as has happened with all my detective novels, this initial inspiration was followed by the heart-lifting certainty that I would write another book.

  I was extremely lucky with the research. By chance at a public dinner I sat next to Gavyn Arthur, who inquired what I was working on. When I said I was researching a new novel to be set in the Middle Temple, he told me that he was in Chambers there and would be happy to help. This help, generously given, proved invaluable. Within minutes he had saved me from what could have been a serious error if I had myself failed to detect it. He asked which detective I was employing on the case. When I said Adam Dalgliesh, he reminded me that the Temple is within the jurisdiction of the City of London Police, not of New Scotland Yard. This was something I knew but had completely forgotten and might not have remembered in time. I have got over the difficulty by placing my imaginary court and chambers on the boundary between the two jurisdictions so that at least part of the unfortunate victim’s body lies within the territory of the Metropolitan Police. Gavyn Arthur provided me with maps of the Temple showing the entrances and exits, arranged for me to speak to lawyers and clerks in Chambers, to have lunch with the judges at the Old Bailey and to watch a trial in Court Number One. He also kindly vetted the details of legal procedure in the court scene with which the book opens. It was with genuine gratitude that I acknowledged his help in my foreword.

  I suppose that one of the small deprivations of age is that nothing, and certainly not great success or triumph, is ever as exciting as it was in youth. This is probably a mercy, since pain and distress are also less acute. But I woke with a thankful heart for having been given the book. This is always how my writing has seemed to me; nothing to do with my own cleverness but born of a talent which I have done nothing personally to deserve.

  Faber sent my usual driver to collect Joyce and myself and we arrived in very good time. Middle Temple Hall was ideal for the launch. As always it looked magnificent and the publicity department at Faber had been clever over the embellishments.

  The party was a great success and I think everyone there enjoyed it. I was a little afraid that we might break up into groups; lawyers, writers, journalists, family and so on, but that didn’t happen, and
everyone seemed to find a kindred spirit to talk to. There was great advantage in having plenty of room for the one hundred or so present. I can no longer tolerate crowded launch parties where the level of din is so high that ears and brain are continually assaulted, I can’t speak without inducing a sore throat, and am totally unable to hear anyone. This really was a civilized occasion.

  Matthew Evans, Chairman of Faber, made a short, funny and informal speech and I replied equally briefly. It was a huge relief to be holding the party with some excellent reviews behind me. I am always desperately sorry for writers who have to go ahead with these jollities in the knowledge that the book has been poorly received, but it must be even worse for actors who spend long weeks in rehearsal and then are dependent on one or two really influential reviewers.

  I’m frequently asked how much I care about reviews. I’m tempted to say not at all, but this is hardly honest. Most of us do very much welcome good reviews, not only for our own satisfaction, but because of the pleasure they give to publishers and friends. The majority of mine have been so good that I can have no possible complaint. One reviewer was maliciously scathing but he is not someone I would worry about. There are, of course, some reviewers who use reviewing to compensate for professional, creative or sexual failure and others who criticize the author not for the book written, but for the one they think he should have written. There are also those who are reviewing not the book but the writer, and who strongly dislike what they think he stands for, his class, his sex or, most frequently of all, his politics. But these are relatively few, and it is stupid for any writer to take the slightest notice of them.