But you didn’t dare fail to turn up, because that might hand the initiative to the other side. I’d thought of withdrawing from the women debate, because I’d already said what I wanted to say so many times that I recited it involuntarily, sometimes as I cycled or walked, rather like that schoolgirl hopscotch rhyme. It had become a chant, a plainsong, with such a familiarity that you could think of something else entirely as you said it. But I kept coming back because you can’t leave the floor unguarded, and apparently we’d all invested too much time and effort in it.
As I took my place on the altar steps, the floor that night was depressingly full. It’s my experience that the conservatives and traditionalists – or misogyniks as Hugh called them – got their act together far more effectively than the liberati. When we did a soft gig to supporters, preaching to the liberal choir as it were, all we got was a sprinkling of pale vegetarians in scarves and the odd librarian doing a masters in gender politics. By contrast, the righties always whip themselves in through social media like a Tea Party laced with coke.
We were in one of those City churches, which, whatever the show-off Blue Badge guides say, all look the same, even if they’ve been bombed. Dark and dull just about covers it. At this one, a war bomb had taken out the east end, which was replaced by a white marble altar in-the-round, with a vacuous sculpture as its reredos, a lump of rounded white stone supposedly “cradling” a smaller one. It looks like a lozenge mothering a jelly bean.
We sat in chairs just too small to be comfortable – a church leitmotif, that – on the steps in front of this smug installation, the early evening light illuminating the lazily squiggled coloured-glass windows. I was looking down the original nave, which was dark wood and smelt of death, laid out collegiate-style with those raked pews facing each other, across an aisle full of loose chairs facing forwards. These were now filled with the retired, carrying fussy bags full of papers, which evidently needed chairs too. For all his apparently innovative genius, Christopher Wren built places where today the bourgeoisie collated notes.
I was alongside Gerry, one of our male-priest camp followers, who wore a fixed grin and, with his forward-combed fringe that was almost a quiff, looked like a bit-part actor facing a first-night house for a post-performance discussion. To my far right (a gag I’d leveraged all too often at these events) was the opposition, Angela Vincent, the traditionalists’ trophy wife, who knew her place in the Church and it wasn’t in its sacraments, and David Buxted, from the oxymoronic Free in Faith, all high clerical collar and florid jowls.
Angela had a talent for crossing her pale-tighted legs seemingly two or three times at the calves, as if no man, or woman for that matter, this side of Phrygia was going to part them. She wore a crimson suit, in contempt of her tightly tied-back red hair, with a Seventies silk scarf. She looked like an air hostess. Between us was a celeb-columnist who had once been an editor of a newspaper, exuding a patronising bonhomie like a chat-show host. Two women on a panel of four and he still made it feel like tokenism.
Our introductory five-minute set pieces were OK, so far as they went. I was the first up to the lectern, with a thoroughly well-worked routine about our divisions being like tennis nets over which we tried to deliver polemical ace serves. Sometimes our shots were ruled out, sometimes faults were called, but the net was low enough to shake hands, even hug, at the end. And when the match was won, I hoped the victor might jump the net like they did in the old days to join the vanquished where they were, on the same side. It’s a middle-class and twee routine – it’s what’s required – and it was a trite little spiel about Christian division and made it all sound like a game, which is how the Home Counties like it.
Angela went with the headship of the Church (St Paul and all other men) not being about seniority and Mary being the Mother of Heaven. Gerry talked about scripture being used down the ages to endorse a flat Earth and the slave trade. Finally, the jowls reddening to magenta over the high collar, we heard from Buxted about honouring God’s creation of fatherhood and motherhood as enshrined in the teachings of the Church on the incarnation.
Then a short colloquium, during which our old hack got to showcase his abilities as a charming and quick-witted anchorman for any broadcast producers who might have been present. As if. And the panel got to repeat several times what we had just said.
Then the floor had it. Surely Jesus chose twelve male disciples? If I’d had a pound for every time I’d heard that we’d go somewhere nice for dinner, sir. Surely women were persecuting their oppressors? Nothing wrong with women priests, but they should know their place. All the Catholics want is legal protection from offensive radicalism.
Angela was enjoying herself. “In many respects, Natalie and I are the same – we’re both serving Jesus Christ in His Church.”
Amazing how some can actually pronounce His with a capital H. I started to look forward very much indeed to a drink with Hugh with a capital H. I usually stay as silent as possible during this part of a debate. I hoped it might look Christ-like. What is truth, after all.
Then a fair and solid young man stood and took the roaming microphone.
“Toby Naismith from the Foreign
