They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  He also said, ‘Wave thine extremities and be joyful.’ Which led to all sorts of strange behaviour. People finally settled on a kind of threshing movement of both arms, which, when combined with the crouch, made the congregation look like a group of canoeists on a particularly tough stretch of water.

  But the most important thing Wesley told Rose Fox was, ‘Let there be constant movement in thy church.’ He stuck to that. In fact, he kept on repeating it. And he made it clear that he wasn’t talking about regular reallocation of senior positions in the church. So, by the late 198os, the services resembled the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant during a busy lunch hour. People would get up, go to the opposite end of the room, jig about, go back to their seat (or, better still, someone else’s), get up again and jog round the perimeter of the hall.

  As Rose got older, Wesley’s orders got stranger and stranger. Most people agreed that things had gone a bit far when he told the church, in 1982, to ‘Face north-west whenever possible.’ Did this mean when in the middle of the service? Or did it mean just what it said? Were we going to be looking at guys backing into the path of oncoming lorries in order to preserve the decencies? How about the old sexual intercourse? Were spiritualists going to be forced to do it in strange, and possibly overexciting, positions?

  I’d love to be forced to do it in strange positions. It’s my dream.

  Most people ignored this commandment, although I have heard it said that Pike was to be seen with a compass on a number of occasions, trying to align himself correctly. It turned out the reason we all had to face north-west was because it was the direction ‘from which Rose had come forth’! She was born in Liverpool. A year or so later she told everyone that they must make an annual pilgrimage to that city, where she had a cousin in the catering trade who was prepared to give them all cheap rates, but by that time Rose was losing her grip on the faithful.

  We started with Healing. People are always being Healed down at the church. It is certainly easier to get the medical treatment dished out by Roger Beeding’s wife than it is to get to see your local GP. She does patients in job lots, which is a system I could recommend to the Mayberry Clinic, Wimbledon.

  ‘Stand before if you wish Healing,’ said Beeding, and his wife – a short, dumpy woman called Clara – walked out in front of the congregation, her eyes tightly shut.

  In a high, squeaky voice, she said, ‘Come to me in Jesus’ name!’

  The usual bunch of hypochondriacs shuffled forward. Clara Beeding opened her eyes and looked quite relieved to see Jasper Lewens, Tracy Johnson and the guy with the wart. She had dealt with a case of peritonitis in 1985, and apparently it didn’t work out too well.

  ‘It’s my neck,’ Jasper Lewens was saying in a rather whingeing tone. ‘It won’t leave me alone!’

  Before Lewens could moan on any longer, Clara Beeding put out her hand and touched the side of his head. ‘Your pain,’ she said, with fantastic confidence, ‘is going!’

  Jasper started to rub his neck furiously.

  ‘O Jesus mine,’ went on Clara, ‘see the pain! See how the pain is going from this man! See how it leaves his body and becomes at one with Thy Word!’

  Before he had a chance to respond, Clara had moved on to Tracy Johnson. Tracy has a thing I can only describe as Nonspecific Pain. Some weeks it’s in her head, some weeks it’s in her chest and some weeks it’s in her legs. This week it was in her womb. ‘O Lord Jesus,’ she kept saying, ‘it is in my womb!’

  Tracy isn’t as easy to deal with as Jasper. She likes to make sure everyone knows exactly where the pain is, how long it goes on for and whether it’s burning, stabbing, singeing or a combination of all three.

  But, before she could really get under way, from one side of the church, the one that leads out to the dustbins, came a group of three or four people one of whom I recognized as Sheldon Parry, the born-again television director. Sheldon, who is a really nice bloke and very fond of children, was pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair. She looked quite happy to be in the wheelchair. Or maybe she was happy at the fact that, in a few minutes, after a couple of minutes’ contact with Clara Beeding’s right mitt, she would be skipping around with the best of them.

  Clara did not look best pleased to see her. The peritonitis wasn’t her only disaster. She had gone badly wrong – so my dad said – with a case of genital herpes. You could tell that she was looking forward to doing her number on the wart. She knows where she is with a wart. But she didn’t flinch. She turned away from Tracy Johnson and went straight to the woman in the chair.

  ‘O Lord!’ she said, speaking extra loud to drown out Tracy mumbling on about her womb. ‘O Jesus, who made the blind to see and the lame to walk, look down on this woman!’

  The old lady looked up at her. Clara stretched out her hands and held them above her client’s head. She was not going to back down on this one, you could tell. ‘You can walk!’ she said, in a throaty voice.

  ‘No I can’t!’ said the old lady, sounding rather perky. ‘I can’t walk at all. That’s why I’m here.’

  Clara gave a little silvery laugh and stretched out her hand again until it was about an inch from the old lady’s permanent wave. ‘Rise up!’ she said. ‘Rise up and walk!’

  The old lady struggled for a bit and then subsided back into her chair. ‘I can’t!’ she said, sounding rather apologetic. ‘I really can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t walk!’

  For a moment I thought Clara was going to give the old woman a piece of her mind. Didn’t she understand? You don’t get better down at the First Spiritualist Church. You get Healed. The two are not necessarily the same thing at all. And she hadn’t said when the disagreeable old trout was going to walk. It might be next week, or a year next Tuesday. She might, at least, look a bit grateful at Mrs Beeding’s taking all this trouble over her.

  Before things could get really awkward, there was a movement from the other end of the hall. It was Quigley. He always knows when to provide a distraction. ‘I have News!’ he said. ‘I have Great News!’

  There is always News at morning service, and it is usually Great News. It can be news of a member of the congregation’s promotion, or someone’s marriage, or – even better – someone being run over by a lorry, but there is always news. On a slow day, Quigley just goes through the newspapers and rambles on about whatever comes into his brain. One year, I remember, he gave us half an hour on John McEnroe being slung out of the Men’s Singles.

  This morning, I had a horrible feeling that the news might be something to do with me.

  Quigley pushed his way forward towards the platform as the woman in the wheelchair was hustled away and the man with the wart returned, rather miserably, to his place in the congregation. Quigley had with him, I noticed, a brown box.

  ‘I have News,’ he said, ‘about one of Us!’

  I coughed nervously. Quigley leaned down, picked up the box and, from it, pulled out something that looked like a waffle iron.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a paper-stripper!’

  People nodded seriously.

  ‘It strips off,’ said Quigley, archly. Quite a number of heads turned in my direction.

  ‘It strips off old wallpaper so that new paper can be hung. New starts can be made on old walls!’

  Suddenly his face grew dark with anger. His voice climbed a couple of octaves. ‘But stripping paper isn’t the answer,’ he yelled – ‘it isn’t the answer if the wall is basically no good!’

  People nodded some more.

  ‘This paper-stripper,’ he went on, ‘isn’t doing God’s work! Because God, like us, cannot work with substandard materials. We are going to throw it aside!’

  The man next to me looked a touch apprehensive. The paper-stripper was about a foot long and nine inches wide. It looked as if it was quite solidly constructed.

  ‘Away you go, old paper-stripper!’ screamed Quigley, as he raised the device high over the heads of the congregation. ‘You are only so much rubbish! Go forth!�
�� And, suiting the action to the words, he hurled the metal object towards the opposite wall, narrowly missing Hannah Dooley as he did so. It crashed into the flowerpots on the whitewashed ledge under the window, raining pottery, bits of geranium and John Innes Number 3 Compost all over the congregation.

  They loved it. You could hear them gasp as Quiggers reached out his arm to them.

  ‘But in this church,’ he said, ‘is a virgin piece of wall. A piece of wall that is clean and firm and decent even when the paper has been stripped away from it!’

  I had a nasty feeling that I was part of this do-it-yourself metaphor. I stood there looking up at him, wishing that someone would demolish me.

  Mrs Quigley, as always, was on cue. ‘Have you got News, Albert?’

  He looked at her blankly. Yes, you could see him thinking, I have damaged a vitally important piece of domestic equipment!

  ‘News for us, Albert?’

  Quigley was still reeling from the impact of his great gesture. He was, of course, the man who had once brought in a cup, painted black on the inside and white on the outside, and, after pointing out its close resemblance to the soul of the average sinner, had jumped up and down on it, foaming at the mouth. But the paper-stripper! This was something that would be hard to beat.

  ‘News?’

  ‘News!’ said Quigley, and then looked across at me. For a moment I thought he was going to get back to the DIY metaphor and start to try to get them to see me as undercoat or Jesus Christ as primer, but, instead, he recovered himself enough to say, ‘Great News!’

  There was a sort of rhubarb effect from the pit. ‘What news?’ ‘Great news?’ ‘What be this news?’ ‘News, they say!’ etc. etc.

  Quigley looked in the direction in which he had hurled the paper-stripper as his old lady repeated, ‘O Jesus, Great News!’ She raised her hands above her head, trying to get this going. ‘O Jesus Christ!’ she said.

  You could see that the temperature needed raising. A few people came back with ‘O Jesus!’ or ‘Yes, Jesus!’ but nobody was ready for talking in tongues or, indeed, listening to people talking in tongues, which I have often thought is much the more taxing of the two options.

  ‘Is it News about a boy?’ she asked, reminding me of an actor working with someone who has completely forgotten his lines.

  Quigley was looking at her blankly. ‘A boy . . .’ he said, his heart still with the wallpaper-stripper.

  ‘What’s the boy’s name?’ asked Pike.

  Short of giving the guy cue sheets, there was not much else we could do. Quigley’s eyes shifted, weasel-like, from me, to Pike, to his old lady. At the far side of the church, old Mr Pugh, who had swallowed about half a kilo of compost, was coughing furiously.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannah Dooley, who gave the appearance of one prepared to be genuinely surprised by the answer, ‘What is his name?’

  Quigley very slowly raised his right hand. I had the impression that if he didn’t come through on this one soon his position was going to be in very grave danger. Life at the top end of the First Spiritualist Church has a sharp, corporate edge to it. But, before our eyes, he seemed to find strength. The first two fingers closed together as if he was a little kid pretending he had a gun. He extended his arm fully and began to waggle it in an arc across the faces of the congregation.

  ‘It’s a very special name,’ he said.

  It was still hard to tell whether he had actually cottoned on to what the name was. But quite often Quigley will keep his audience in such a state of suspense that he forgets what it was he intended to say.

  ‘O Lord!’ said Mrs Q. She looked a bit happier now. Hannah Dooley was looking as if she might do something usefully hysterical at any moment. The woman next to Mr Pugh seemed to be in tears, but that might have been due to the compost.

  ‘It’s a beautiful name,’ said Quigley. ‘A beautiful and holy name!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pike, his eyes glinting madly behind his wire glasses, ‘but what is the name?’

  He sounded, I thought, a touch peevish about this – although years of supporting Quigley might make any man edgy. I wasn’t sure. A strange change had come over Leo in the last week or so. Of all of the First Spiritualists, he was the only one who seemed, in some way, to have been affected by this business with my dad. Why should that be?

  ‘There’s an S in it!’ said Quigley, who was still keeping his cards pretty close to his chest.

  ‘Ohhh!’ said the congregation.

  This was all getting a bit like the Paul Daniels show.

  ‘There’s an I in it!’ said Quigley.

  ‘Ohhhh!’

  ‘And an M and an N and an E!’

  I wondered who he was talking about. A new recruit called Smein, possibly.

  ‘And an O!’ said Quigley, sounding a bit perturbed.

  Maybe he was talking about someone called Simone. Or a new Japanese Christian called Monsei. Not that it mattered. No one is liable to comment on a renegade E in the First Church. Quigley was now back on course, and you could feel the relief in the audience.

  ‘It’s a SIMON!’ he said.

  ‘Ohhhh!’ moaned the punters.

  The paper-stripper was forgotten. He could have flung fifty paper-strippers at them now and they wouldn’t have minded. ‘It’s a SIMON!’

  Or a Smonie or a Nemois.

  I felt myself propelled towards the stage. Terry Melchett, the supermarket manager, whose wife left him for another woman, gave me a hard shove in the small of the back. Kate Melville and Sue d’Argy Smith, whose daughters left the church, as so many do, just before they became nubile, each took a hand and gave it a sharp pull, and over their heads came the long arms of Gordon the Bachelor, whose fingers stroked my hair, as countless other key personnel in the body of Christendom, South Wimbledon stroked, shoved, pulled and all but carried me towards the stage on which I was supposed to pour out the secrets of my heart.

  ‘We’re going to sing!’ shouted Quigley.

  There is no order of hymns in the First Spiritualist Church. You sing as the spirit moves. Sometimes two different sections of the congregation will be belting out two completely different numbers.

  ‘What are we going to sing?’ called someone at the back.

  There was a lot more rhubarb, along the lines of ‘Yes, what?’ and ‘What are we going to sing, brothers?’ and then Mrs Quigley cut in over the top of this with a cadenza that would not have disgraced Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

  ‘Te-e-e-sti-fyyy!’

  We all looked around. There was a hunting-horn quality to this which suggested that someone else was supposed to get up and answer. They did.

  ‘What shall we Te-e-e-stify?’ sang young Mr Pugh.

  ‘We shall tes-ti-i-i-fyy,’ sang Mrs Quigley, to a tune that seemed to be completely of her own devising, ‘to-o-o the-e-e Lor-or-ord!’

  ‘Give me a one!’ said Quigley.

  Over by the piano, Mary Bunn squirmed on her piano stool and gave him a one.

  ‘Give me a two!’ said Quigley.

  Next to Mary Bunn, Big Louie the Jamaican, on drums, gave him a two.

  ‘Give me a three!’ said Quigley.

  Next to Big Louie the Jamaican, Sylvia Margaret Williams, our seventy-nine-year-old bass guitarist, gave him a three.

  Quigley leaped into the air like a monkey that has sat on a bunsen burner and gave a sort of primal grunt. The First Spiritualists needed no encouragement. They had done this before and they would do it again. As one voice they went into one of Rose Fox’s greatest hits:

  Testify! Testify!

  Take your troubles to the Lord!

  Testify! Testify!

  Take your troubles to the Lord!

  Take your troubles—

  Oh take your troubles—

  Take your trou-ou-ou-oubles—

  Take your troubles to the Lord!

  There is more, I fear. I don’t think it was dictated to her by John Wesley. But, when in doubt, it is the one we always reach for. Gr
eat truths are always simple, right? And, whatever else you might want to say about this number, you would have to admit it was simple. The tune sounds as if it was dictated to Rose Fox by a three-year-old child.

  The band hit their instruments harder and harder and the congregation started to stamp in time.

  Testify! Testify!

  Take your troubles to the Lord!

  The walls were shaking. On the roof above me, the shabby light-shades shook on their long flexes. The glass of the windows shook in its wooden frames. Mary Bunn, hitting the keys harder and harder for Jesus, lifted herself off the stool and brought her bum down with a crash as she laid down chord after chord. The congregation were like different parts of a huge engine, each one passing a movement on and the recipient taking it up and changing it. It was as if there was a wave of water and the wave turned a wheel and the wheel turned a cog and the cog turned a piston and the piston punched out a wave, bigger and more overwhelming than the first wave, turning a bigger wheel, a bigger cog, a bigger piston and then finally a wave that seemed enough to swallow everything in its path. The whole crowd was shouting, like some awful, natural machine.

  Testify! Testify!

  Take your troubles to the Lord!

  Testify! Testify!

  Take your troubles to the Lord!

  As I got closer to the raised platform at the far end of the church, it was as if the sound was pushing me forward. The sound was shaking the roof and rocking the floor. It was rapping in my back as I was pushed past Roger Beeding and Roger de Mornay and closer and closer to the eight steps that led up to the low wooden platform on which was the gigantic cross and the large black-and-white photograph of Rose Fox.

  It was only when I was actually up there and the music had stopped, and I found myself looking down at a hundred or so expectant faces, that I remembered the magnitude of the task in front of me. I had not only to Testify as to how, where and when the Lord Jesus had entered my heart but also to give the punters a detailed account of the innermost secrets of my heart. What I felt about life, my immediate family, the church and the wider issues facing society. Such as the full-scale invasion of sw19 by extraterrestrial beings.