Stage Fright in Chapel

We were reading a sonnet last night about one student’s memory of her confirmation day.

I hadn’t eaten any Proustian madeleines but suddenly the Remembrance of Things Past came back to me, vividly.

I found myself back in chapel again in south Wales. It had lots of family connections.

My grandfather was the chapel treasurer and my grandmother used to house and feed visiting preachers. My mother played the organ occasionally when the regular organist, Jack the Organ, couldn’t.

There she was again – Matilda (I’ll call her that in case her descendants track me down and excommunicate me), sitting in front of me in her regular spot in the pew. Matilda was the incarnation of that awful demonic Granny in Giles’ cartoons. But, instead of the scarf, a hideous fox stole was forever wrapped around her neck, always miraculously placed so that the fox’s head and its desiccated beady eyes stared right back at me. I prayed the House of God would offer some protection from its evil glare.

Now, Wales being a musical nation, most people can hold a note. Matilda, however, must have had some non- Welsh blood because she definitely could not. Her loud, horrible, off-key wailings and prolonged strangulated Amens would have been better employed as a soundtrack to The Omen. I wanted to prod her and tell her she was ruining my mother’s playing of the organ, but those evil fox eyes always warded me off.

At times I could be a rather, um, assertive teenager, (well let’s be honest, a total pain in the neck) and I still cringe at the memory of the time when the preacher and his wife came to tea. My mother went out of the room to sort out the cakes and I was left alone with the couple. They politely asked how my B.A. in French was going. And so, insufferable wretch that I was, I airily informed them that I was enjoying Sartre and had become an atheist Existentialist as a result. 

I can’t quite remember the stitch-up which involved me agreeing to recite some Welsh poetry in chapel the next Sunday. The chance to show off by declaiming a poem off by heart was just too good to miss.

Come the day, I went up to the preacher’s podium, smugly surveyed the congregation, opened my mouth and froze! I couldn’t remember a damn word and had to read it off from the sheet I’d luckily brought with me.

Oh, the humiliation!

In the audience I spotted Matilda facing me, looking grimly on and wearing her usual stole. 

Although I couldn’t see it from the front, I’m sure, to this day, that that fox, behind her back, was laughing its desiccated head off.