I am so deeply in debt to Roxanne Kindersley and her paintbox that I’m going to be baking cookies for her until kingdom come. This is the story.
There was once a time in the life of the Church of England when priests got to say “no” to many things. A priest might refuse to baptise your child by the name you had chosen. If it was a contraction (like Billy) or a diminutive (like Minnie), he might suggest that “William” or “Mary” was what you wanted.
When I was curate in Kidderminster, there was a woman who enjoyed ringing round the churches to ask whether we’d baptise her baby “Pagan”. Someone finally shut her up by saying, “Yes, of course. After St Paganus, I presume?”
The vicar would also get to tell people what kinds of music and readings they could have at weddings and funerals. This may still be the case in cathedrals and the grander churches, but in the kind of village church where I’m priest we’ve learned it’s a bad idea. People can now take their weddings, their funerals and their babies elsewhere and find the love of God and the comfort of their friends outside the church. More importantly, it’s hard to find theological justification for it. We should be able to find God in the songs and readings that move the people of our parishes.
Tastefulness is not next to godliness. It is, however, one of the guiding principles in the matter of churchyard regulations. Nobody seems able to tell me when the task of approving monuments in churchyards was delegated to local priests. Permissions seem to have been needed by the mid-1800s. But from whom? The chancellor of the diocese, I suppose. If you were wealthy and well-connected enough to want a monument, you would know who to write to, and your obelisk, angel or rugged cross would be approved. Nowadays, a year doesn’t go by without churchyard regulations (or at least their rigid interpretation) causing grief, ridicule and headlines.
Here in my benefice in Great Wilbraham there’s the gravestone of a boy who was killed in a road accident. According to the version of the story I was first told, the boy’s family wanted a pheasant engraved on it, but the vicar at the time interpreted the rules to mean that only creatures specifically mentioned in Holy Scripture could appear on churchyard monuments. “You can have a quail,” the vicar said, “since there are no pheasants in the Bible.” Someone told me later: “Actually, what they wanted was a bunny.” Even worse; at least pheasants and quail are both game birds.
Tastefulness is not next to godliness
Bearing these things in mind, along with the toys on a baby’s grave to which we turn a blind eye, I gave permission last year for Charlie T’s daughters to have the robin redbreast on Charlie’s monument painted so that it would be obvious that it wasn’t a hedge sparrow. Then, six months ago, waiting outside the church for another funeral to begin, someone tapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Vicar,” said Peter L. “You let Charlie T’s girls have colour on his stone, but you said no when I asked for Rita’s flowers to be painted.”
This is the kind of thing we all dread. The precedent, the thin end of the wedge. Let them have a painted robin and, before you know it, it will be a black marble teddy bear—or worse. “I’m sorry,” I said, “those are the regulations. But I’ve changed my mind about how to interpret them. And besides, we’ll be under water here in 50 years.” “My, you’re cheerful,” he said. “What colour did you want the flowers to be?” I asked. “Yellow,” he responded. “Yellow freesias. Her favourite.”
So I told Roxanne Kindersley about Rita, who was a daughter of the village; a dinner lady at our school; someone who sat with sick people and loved little black dresses, Bacardi and lime, and putting off the diet until tomorrow.
One day late in 2022, when the weather was still unseasonably pleasant, Roxanne came to the churchyard with her tools and painted the freesias sandblasted on Rita’s stone. It took three hours: green for the stem and the leaves; green buds tipped with yellow; yellow flowers veined with orange and white. There’s nothing more beautiful in the churchyard.
