Celebrating Christmas in the City
A drunken tramp, a ghost, a murderer… Christmas in a Christopher Wren church was full of Dickensian drama, recalls the Rev Peter Mullen
‘Ibet you don’t get this many every week!’ a visitor to my church, St Michael, Cornhill, said at our Christmas Midnight Mass. ‘It’s a miracle we get anyone at all,’ I said. ‘Hardly anyone actually lives in the City of London and, at Christmas, public transport is virtually non-existent.’
Then there was the challenge of the sermon. In my 14 Christmases at St Michael’s (attributed to Wren and Hawksmoor), the one they liked best was about my childhood in my grandpa’s newsagent’s shop in Leeds: Priestley’s, opposite the jail. Everyone knew Jim Priestley, two sacks of newspapers across his shoulders, delivering to the sootblackened houses, plaintively singing, ‘Poor little Joe, out in the snow.’
In the evenings, the lights of the prison cells were in rows, like those from the cabins of a passing ocean liner. In fact, Grandpa wasn’t at all poor: he had two shops and, on Christmas Eve, I, licking cocoa powder and sugar from a greaseproof bag, was commandeered to take messages between them.
I was often asked for ‘the sermon that’s a poem about the Virgin Mary’. I wrote the longish poem; the congregation particularly liked the ending:
Heaven and earth are in this barn: She looks and he looks back at her: There is a small movement – The slight adjustment of his shawl; Her hand moves in a half-light gesture, slow. As kings and shepherds, stars and
distant worlds Behold the little boy from heaven: Darling Jesus, Emmanuel, thou art come, Come, rejoice us, And turn our hearts to thee.
The place went a bit quiet after that. At a carol service for the Fuellers Company, a tramp prone to violent outbursts – he had once knocked two members of the congregation at St Stephen Walbrook to the floor – walked up the aisle while we were singing We Three Kings. He shuffled slowly, close to dead drunk, and stopped at the chancel step. I was fearful of what he might do next. There was an audible sigh of relief when he turned and walked slowly back down the aisle and out. The hymn finished and there was a dense silence. I thought I’d try to lighten the atmosphere a bit; so I announced to the congregation, ‘That was one of the Three Wise Men. The other two will be along in a minute.’
At least that tramp was in the land of the living. One Christmas Eve, I was laying out the altar linen for the midnight service. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a clergyman walking up the south aisle towards the vestry. I moved away from the altar and into the aisle to meet him. That was when he walked past me and straight through the vestry door. Nothing unusual about that – except it was closed and locked. I unlocked the door and went inside, only to find no one there. I asked our parish clerk, who had been at St Michael’s for ever, and knew everyone who ever was. ‘Oh, so you’ve seen the ghost, have you?’ He pointed to a photograph on the vestry wall: ‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ There was no doubting it was Father Ellison, a previous rector, long since dead.
I lived in the Watch House, just round the corner from glorious Smithfield Market. One Christmas Eve, I set off for the butcher’s to get the turkey. What a scene! Straight out of the 19th century – like the bit in A Christmas Carol where dozens of white-coated, white-hatted butchers charge around the square pushing their noisy trolleys, piled high with seasonal meats. Some of the butchers were singing. Others called raucous Merry Christmases to their colleagues. It was a tableau, come to life, of The Cryes of Ancient London.
One year, I took St Michael’s choir to Wormwood Scrubs and we sang for, and with, the inmates and officers. Once a prisoner asked me, ‘Where does that bit you read about God having a place for our tears come from?’ I told him it was part of Psalm 56 – ‘Put my tears into thy bottle.’
His eyes filled up as he said, ‘It’s so bloody tender!’ I asked him how long he was serving. ‘Life. I murdered the missus. She nagged me for years and one day I just snapped. I miss her every day and I’ve never stopped loving her.’
Christmas is the one day when the City traffic falls silent. My Christmas Day walk was down Cheapside into Cornhill, where all sorts in all conditions filled St Michael for Festival Eucharist: Mozart’s Credo Mass. The triumphant organ, the soaring choir and ‘Yea Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning…’ What joy!