A life celebrated
The funeral of John Hencher took place on Wednesday 13th April at Hereford Crematorium. A packed chapel, with many standing, sang, laughed, wept as we listened to a number of his friends speak about his life. The constant theme was how The Johns created a relationship that welcomed many others into their home and garden.
What follows are a number of the contributions. If any of the others who spoke would like to have what they said in this tribute please send them to me at bjr@dircon.co.uk and I will do the rest.
My words
I am not quite sure who it was in the staff room of Kidderminster College of Further Education that, one day in the late winter of 1969, whispered in my paranoid hearing, "He lives with a vicar....”pause”... in Stourbridge." Another voice: "In Stourbridge? Well I never." That overheard conversation, fundamentally changed my life. The 'he' from voice one was immediately obvious to me. A young man in another department who wore a smart leather jacket and sported kipper ties. Remember, outside central London, the swinging 60s did not really arrive until the 70s. I was soon accidentally on purpose often bumping into Mr Kipper Tie. One day, we were both chatting and he casually said would I like to have supper one evening with him and his friend. Would I! And so it came to pass, some sleepless night’s later, that I was pressing the doorbell marked VICAR at Amblecote Vicarage. Inside, a scene out of a novel in which all of us now have a part. The VICAR, the life of whom we are celebrating today, and John Cupper, a dog Jess, an Aga and the rest is my/our history. The evening was so memorable that I can still remember what we ate – gammon and eggs.
Well the Johns and I have travelled a distance since that Friday night. At the end of that evening I got into my mini van NDK 939G and drove over back to my digs in Kidderminster intoxicated with happiness and stunned by what I had just seen. Here were two men, seemingly quite normal but never ordinary, not parodies camping it up, variously fun and serious who clearly loved each other living together. How we talked that night, I was drunk on the talk but also on the validation I had that there was something totally normal about what we now call being gay.
Remember, that the very word only really began to used commonly later that year and that was far away from Amblecote vicarage, in Greenwich village, Manhattan, in New York City were a near riot occurred between the patrons of bar patronized by ‘homosexuals’ and the police. We did not use the word gay in those days. At The Johns the talk was not of gay liberation it was gay liberation. We were living it. Here in the love the two Johns had for each other was a special generous place where others, many of whom are here today met with a glass of gin or whatever on arrival, good food and wine and generous hospitality and laughter and talk.
Paul and I have a shared fantasy on our journey from Leicester to The Tank House. When we turn off the A38 at Droitwich and take the road to Ombersley we suddenly enter what we call Narnia. That world of Worcestershire and then Herefordshire that is like no other part of the country. Those of you who live here it is home but for those of us who cross the great plain of the Midlands east to west it is magical. Then we pass through Ombersley, round the roundabout near Ombersley Court in the stables of which John was born, or so he told us, with its LODGE and the Dower House on the right, down to the Severn, up up up to Tenbury Wells, then over St Michaels, to Leominster, then, almost there, through Pembridge along the A44 then finally down the lane to Weston and to our destination, The Tank House.
Standing there since the 1430s, a priest’s house, in the garden, the paradise the Johns made since 1974. I linger over the place names because of the specialness of these parts as locations for the friendship ties that bind many of us here today. Many of us know each other because we met at The Tank House, a few of us from before, from Salperton even Ombersley. Our friendships with the Johns have so contributed to the quality of our lives. And the differing personalities of the two Johns so much part of the welcoming embrace. And now we have lost, in a physical way, JH. Although watching the video of him reciting Sonnet 18 in the TH garden only quite recently reminds us of what we have lost and what will never lose….including the wicked turning away after the last line and cheekily sending himself up.
Friendship is the great consolation, especially at times of great loss. Such as now. There cannot be great love without great loss when it inevitably happens.
We are enormously grateful to you John Hencher and to you John Cupper for the generosity of how you have shared your love for each other with all of us here. In your great loss, dear John, we your family of friends stand with you in solidarity and love. Thank you.
This is what Brian Viner said
John, ladies and gentlemen, I have to admit that I stand before you with no stipend at all ... I am standing up here, stipendless, and feeling immensely grateful to you John, for this privilege. Talking about John comes so easily to all of us, but we don’t all get the opportunity to do it in front of an audience ... I can almost hear him chuckling at the double-entendre.
It’s about eight years since my wife Jane and I first met John. We had moved from London to deepest Herefordshire, and were wondering who our kindred spirits were going to be. To our surprise, we found them in a group of people several decades our senior: Shelagh, Jim, Nancy, John and John.
I can remember the first time Shelagh invited us for lunch, because she said she wanted us to meet some old and dear friends of hers, the Johns, and I hope I can be forgiven for confessing that we went with slight apprehension, feeling that the fun we’d routinely had with our contemporaries in London was unlikely to be replicated with, if John and Shelagh and Jim will forgive me, the senior citizenry.
How preposterously, indeed unforgivably wrong we were. That first lunch, and all the many others that followed it after the seven of us had formed what we grandly called the Friday Luncheon Club, were like mini-festivals of riotous laughter, and much of that laughter, it has to be said, was provoked by Hencher. In my career in journalism I have been lucky enough to meet some of the most celebrated tellers of anecdotes: Peter Ustinov, Billy Connolly, Albert Finney, but hand on heart, I can say that none of them had quite John’s panache with a story.
The best of them were those that had arisen from his own extraordinarily rich life. There was one that I told in my column in The Independent last week, and knowing the circulation of The Independent I think I can safely retell it here.
In 1966, when John was vicar of a church in Amblecote, near Stourbridge, a man from the diocesan magazine came to interview him. John was young, attractive, charismatic, with excellent living-quarters and a medium-sized stipend. The man from the diocesan magazine said “I don’t understand, Father, why you aren’t married. I’m sure you’re looking out for a wife. Do tell me what you look for in a prospective wife.”
John made no attempt to duck the question. “I would want someone who liked dogs and looked like Ingrid Bergman,” he said.
It was an innocuous, throwaway remark but when it appeared in the diocesan magazine, the local newspaper picked it up. And once it had been in the local paper, several national newspapers ran the story. Then, indeed, the story crossed the Atlantic. ‘English Vicar Seeks Wife’ was the headline in the Toronto Star. “In the leafy English village of Amblecote,” began the story in the New York Times, which incidentally caused great mirth in Amblecote, one of the centres of the Midlands glass-making industry. In the Sunday Express, a Giles cartoon featured a vicar’s housekeeper telling him that Ingrid Bergman was on the phone. For three or four days, John was world-famous.
He deserved to be famous. But then we would have to have shared him with strangers. One of our fondest memories is of his 75th birthday lunch, at a restaurant in Ombersley, the Worcestershire village in which John had grown up. John told us that his father had been chauffeur to Lord Sandys, the owner of Ombersley Court, and that he, his parents and his sisters had grown up in a flat above the stables. Now for some reason, the Ombersley Court stables were chosen, during the war, as a safe haven for the nation’s ceremonial state carriages. So at the restaurant that day, in a stage whisper that might have been heard in nearby Droitwich, John announced to us - I hope the Dean will forgive me, and indeed him - that he’d had his first sexual experience in Queen Victoria’s funeral coach. It was the conversation stopper of all time. “I remember that the interior was all black and purple,” he boomed. “And I still get excited when I smell mothballs.”
John was not a man to relinquish attention once he had grabbed it so thrillingly. He went on to tell us that he bore no resemblance at all to his late father, the chauffeur, but enjoyed the distinctive features of one of Britain’s most prominent aristocratic families, the Earls of Dudley. He had once seen a portrait of the 11th Earl, who had been a friend of Lord Sandys and on whom his highly attractive, rather flighty mother used to wait at shooting parties. Apparently it could easily have been a portrait of him. If his suspicions were true, then I think it’s fair to say that John brought some real class to the Dudley line.
He was, after all, nothing if not a class act. And when he had an audience that wasn’t right for his stories, he found other ways to entertain. Our children loved him. He and John used to come to us on Boxing Day and he would perform wonderful magic tricks - indeed his greatest trick was making our children look forward more to Boxing Day, knowing that the Johns were coming for lunch, than they did to Christmas Day itself.
John, I hope that you will continue to come to us on Boxing Day, not that any of us will need the excuse of the festive season to clink glasses in loving memory of a truly wonderful, funny, warm, talented man, who so enhanced all our lives. Thank you.
The celebration included a poem written just after John died by Meg Cox.
John Redux
We left earlier than we had before
sooner than we wanted,
and held the swing doors open for each other
with care. Not talking.
A man was leaving at the same time, smiling,
and we stood aside for him and the new baby
he held in his hands, unswaddled,
carried before him like a gift or an offering.
Then the daylight surprised us,
as when you leave a matinee
and not looking back we followed
into a changed air.
No comments:
Post a Comment