Gargoyles at Winchcombe

The gargoyles are roosting on Saint Peter’s Church.  They’re malevolent buggers, hewn from fear and a kind of grim cheeriness.

Their faces are old enough to be eroding back into the mellow ochre of the Cotswold stone.  Consequently, moss covered features look less sharp, but carved eyes seem more prominent.  Stone tongues lick demon mouths and smiles are lascivious snarls.  We’ve brought bright February sunshine with us, but it’s a bit brash; barely warming the earth yet.

The gargoyles are hiding in high places, peeping over turrets and drain pipes. Thin feet are those of pigs' or cats' and there is the occasional pair of wings twisting round arches on windows.

In the graveyard, celandine and snowdrops intermingle companionably and the inhabitants of the graves sleep on, knowing what the living still can’t quite believe.  That the quick and the dead live together as easily as the early spring flowers do.

One of my sons, my city boy, longs for the certainty of concrete under foot.  “The countryside scares me”, he says.  “With its big, empty spaces, its (and he reaches for all that is dreadful) craft shops.”   One of the gargoyles, a particularly insect-like one, is skittering down a wall and my son catches sight of it out of the corner of his eye and he jumps.

Inside the church, the pile of leaflets urges us to come to messy church on Saturday mornings.  “Old people trying to appeal to the young”, my son reckons.  “Trying to make all this” - and his young hands sweep past the benches and the altar and the pulpit - “mean something”.

The light is bottle green through the windows and long, afternoon shadows slant across the choir stalls.  Angels sing from the vaulted roof.

We read the prayers people have written on post-its:

“Hoping Rosie gets good news about her cancer next week.”

“Please send me a partner because I’m so lonely”.  My younger son, with a child’s cutting logic, says he thinks the man needs a dating agency, not God.

“Dear Father, please help an old woman who is in pain.”

We’re about to leave when I notice a woman sitting in a pew, reading a newspaper and drinking a coffee.  I wonder if she’s left a prayer and she catches me looking at her.  We smile at each other and then both look away.

“I’m sure there’s no God?” my older son whispers - an assertion that only the slight rise at the end of his sentence tells me he wants confirming.

And I feel the fragile confidence of youth as a strong memory.  The headstrong, deep-shallow certainty of everything.

I shut the church’s raggedy, oak door behind us, thinking of Wind and Worry nights when it’s three o’clock forever.  When gargoyle faces loom out of the darkness.  Sniggering, doubting, rubbishing.

And for a moment, I wish more than anything, I had faith.  The golden, Cotswold stone faith of an old church in an in-between season on a cold afternoon.

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