Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom
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bleaching their hair. Francie competed for attention by becoming very devout. He was a conspicuously good boy and when he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a priest. This made his mother happy.
He gave up his priestly ambitions, however, when he was just sixteen and he attended a rally organised by the Assemblies of God. At the rally there was singing and dancing, and a full band with a drummer and percussionist and a six-piece horn section, most of whom were black and many of whom swayed as they played their wonderful, loud, joyful music. This was not the kind of colour or spectacle that Francie had ever seen at the Church of the Cross and the Passion, where it was regarded as pretty racy of Father Baird to persist in smoking his pipe on a Sunday and to claim to prefer the Mass in Latin, and where there had been much argument one year about the choir singing a modern setting of the Psalms. Attending the rally therefore had approximately the same effect on Francie as seeing stars in the daytime sky, or the feel of a woman stroking your thigh, a favourite fantasy of Francie’s ever since his piano lessons with a certain Miss Buchanan, lessons which required Miss Buchanan to squeeze up unnaturally close to her pupils on a small piano stool.* It was a kind of ecstasy. From the Assemblies of God Francie soon moved on to the house church movement and by the time he was twenty-two he had left kitchen fitting to attend a bible college – a large old crumbling house in Hampshire with Portakabins in the grounds – where he had undertaken numerous feats of healing, many of them involving people with one leg mysteriously slightly shorter than the other, marathon sessions of speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands, and the studying of the Bible without the inconvenience of learning Greek and Hebrew. It was great fun. It was better than kitchen fitting. Francie preferred the Church to his family. He was no longer one out of ten. He was one in a million: he had been chosen by God. And by the time he returned home to set up a church of his own he was ready to choose a wife.†
He met Cherith while evangelising on the street. She was with a group of friends going to a nightclub – Scruples, in the basement of the Quality Hotel’s back-bar extension, a club which is long gone but which many of us still remember fondly. Francie had spoken to the girls about Jesus, and Cherith said she was a Christian already.
‘But have you asked Jesus into your heart?’ asked Francie.
It was not an obvious chat-up line, but Cherith liked the way he looked her straight in the eye when he spoke, and she liked his honest and open smile, and to be honest Francie rather liked her long blonde hair and her small firm breasts.
At the time he was twenty-two and Cherith was just sixteen. Two years passed in chaste and secret engagement, with Cherith attending Francie’s church, first in the Central School hall and then in the community centre on Windsor Road, and on the day of Cherith’s eighteenth birthday Francie presented himself at her parents’ in his best and only suit and tie, and asked for her hand in marriage. Cherith’s mother Barbara thought it was wonderfully romantic, while Cherith’s father Ron said – in private, to Barbara – that he’d rather his daughter married a drug dealer or a criminal than some weird religious cradle-snatching nut who was running a church which didn’t have its own premises. But when he discovered that Francie was an heir to the McGinn kosher kitchen empire he relented, welcomed Francie into the bosom of the family, and he and Barbara toasted their good fortune with a bottle of sparkling white wine.
Cherith and Francie were married in the People’s Fellowship, which had finally moved to its own premises in the old Johnson’s Hosiery Factory, where the paint was still wet and the plaster still drying, and where a new blue plastic banner hung across the main entrance over the words ‘STOCKINGS, NYLONS, TIGHTS AND FLESHINGS’ carved deep into the granite. The new banner read, in white on blue, with stylised orange flames licking around the edges of the words: ‘GEARED TO THE TIMES, ANCHORED TO THE ROCK’. At the wedding Francie preached a sermon which focused on some of the more lurid and explicit passages from the Song of Solomon, and the Worship Band played their sweet spiritual music. Bethany was born nine months later.
Bethany was their first and last child – Francie and Cherith both felt that there were so many needy people in the world and that the Lord had called them to minister to them, and so Francie had gone and had the op. Sometimes Cherith felt that they should have gone on and had a big family, but Francie had had enough of big families and he was not the best with children: he was a serious man, with weighty matters always on his mind, and his eyes fixed firmly on the glory of God. Cherith admired her husband and thought he was a good person, but she did sometimes wish that he would lighten up a bit.
As for Francie, he often wondered how he had ended up a minister, since he was clearly such a bad person. He frequently found himself tormented by his impure thoughts, but this was not something he felt he could discuss with Cherith, who was a good person and who always wore long skirts below the knee, who never lost her temper, and who was placid in all matters personal and physical. The closest they had ever come to a frank discussion of their sexual needs and preferences had been a couple of years before when Cherith had asked Francie what he would like for a birthday present and Francie had asked for a video of the singer Shania Twain. This seemed tantamount to requesting under-the-counter hard-core pornography to Cherith, who bought the video nonetheless and who had convinced herself that her husband obviously needed to keep up with popular culture and music in order to be able to communicate effectively to the church’s young people. Late at night, when he was supposed to be preparing a sermon, Francie would sometimes sit in the dark, with the curtains drawn, and watch the singer perform. And he would wish he were performing with her.
That night, the night of the Good Friday Carvery, Bobbie Dylan sang about Jesus coming into people’s hearts and filling them with joy, and about love overflowing, and as she stood there at the microphone, the lights shining upon her, her backing band chugging away in the background, the smell and the smoke of Tom Hines’s barbecued meats hanging in the air, it seemed to Francie that Bobbie was the incarnation of everything he had ever dreamed of: a sanctified version of a rock goddess.
Before his Preaching of the Word Francie went to the Disabled toilet – which was doubling as Bobbie’s changing room – to congratulate and thank Bobbie for her performance.
The two of them were deep in an embrace when Cherith walked in. There had been a long queue for the Ladies, as usual, and Cherith thought she could get away with using the Disabled.
The Carvery went ahead as planned. Francie preached the Word. And Cherith went home and packed.
* There are no sign-writing classes any more, of course – people like Wilkie the Gut, with his vinyls and self-adhesives, have put paid to them – and Colin himself has been reduced to mere painting and decorating in order to supplement his income. It’s been a comedown, for a craftsman. It took Colin about fifteen years to master the various skills of sign-writing, and these days he’s lucky if he gets to do the occasional bit of rag-rolling and marbling, or a Teletubby mural for a rich kid’s bedroom. He works out of a little shed in his back garden and over the door he’s painted the famous inscription from the entrance to hell in Dante’s Inferno, in a nice, simple, chiselled-edge Gothic: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’.
* Barry McClean, the United Reformed Church minister who teaches Philosophy for Beginners at the Institute and who does not actually believe in God as such, would have called Francie’s a ‘believer’s faith’. ‘‘Credo quia absurdum’, as he likes to tell the ever dwindling numbers in his classes, ‘To believe because it is absurd. The believer’s ultimate reassurance. The final abandonment of reason.’ Barry’s own studies in philosophy and religion have alas brought him no reassurance of any kind, and the exercise of his reason had led him only to several obvious and depressing conclusions: that two contradictory statements can be true; that there is no rational order of things; and that the mind is incapable of knowing truth. As a consequence, Barry’s sermons – or ‘talks’, as he likes to call them – are rather lacking in conviction. And his evening classes can be confusing.