A Perfect Spy

Except that today something is up. There’s a buzz around, and its name is Rick. There’s a spark of mischief to their piety today they can’t keep dim and it comes from inside themselves, from the smouldering centre of their dark little sphere, and Rick is its owner and its origin and its instigator. You can read it everywhere: in the portentous, rolling tread of the brown-suited deacon, in the fluttering and exhaling of the hatted women who arrive in a rush imagining they are late, then sit blushing through their white face-powder because they are early. Everyone agog, everyone on tiptoe and a first-class turnout, as Rick would have remarked proudly, and probably he did, for he loved a full house whatever happened, never mind it was his own hanging. A few of them have come by car — such wonders of the day as Lanchesters and Singers — others by trolley-bus, and some have walked; and God’s sea rain has given them beards of cold inside their cheap fox stoles, and God’s sea wind is cutting through the threadbare serge of their Sunday best. Yet there is not one of them, however he has come, who does not brave the weather a second longer to pause and goggle at the notice-board and confirm with his own eyes what the bush telegraph has been telling him these several days. Two posters are fixed to it, both smeared by rain, both to the passer-by as dreary as cups of cold tea. Yet to those who know the code they transmit an electrifying signal. The first in orange proclaims the five-thousand-pound appeal, mounted by the Baptist Women’s League, to provide a reading-room — though all of them know that no book will ever be read in it, that it will be a place to set out homemade cakes and photographs of leprous children in the Congo. A plywood thermometer, designed by Rick’s best craftsmen, is fastened to the railings revealing that the first thousand has already been achieved. The second notice, green, declares that today’s address will be given by the minister, all welcome. But this information has been corrected. A rigid bulletin has been pinned over it, typed in full like a legal warning, with the comically misplaced capital letters that in these parts signal omens.

Due to unforeseen Circumstances, Sir Makepeace Watermaster, Justice of the Peace and Liberal Member of Parliament for this Constituency, will provide today’s Message. Appeal Committee please to Remain behind Afterwards for an Extraordinary meeting.

Makepeace Watermaster himself! And they know why!

Elsewhere in the world, Hitler is winding himself up to set fire to the universe, in America and Europe the miseries of the Depression are spreading like an incurable plague, and Jack Brotherhood’s forebears are abetting them or not according to whatever spurious doctrine of the day prevails in the deniable corridors of Whitehall. But the congregation doesn’t presume to hold opinions on these impenetrable aspects of God’s purpose. Theirs is the dissenting church and their temporal overlord is Sir Makepeace Watermaster, the greatest preacher and Liberal ever born, and one of the Highest in the Land, who gave them this very building out of his own purse. He didn’t, of course. His father Goodman gave it to them, but Makepeace, having succeeded to the fiefdom, has a way of forgetting that his father existed. Old Goodman was a Welshman, a preaching, singing, widowed, miserable potteryman with two children twenty-five years apart of whom Makepeace is the elder. Goodman came here, sampled the clay, sniffed the sea air and built a pottery. A couple of years later he built two more and imported cheap migrant labour to man them, first Low Welsh like himself and afterwards and cheaper still and lower, the persecuted Irish. Goodman lured them with his tied cottages, starved them with his rotten wages, and beat the fear of Hell into them from his pulpit before himself being taken off to Paradise, witness the unassuming monument to him six thousand feet high that stood in the pottery forecourt until a few years ago when the whole lot was ripped down to make way for a bungalow estate and good riddance.