Patrick Skene-Catling

A rector wrecked

issue 12 May 2007

John Walsh’s new novel is a paradoxically enjoyable account of the decline and fall of an Exeter College student of theology who becomes for a short time a performer in vaudeville and then an evangelist of Longford innocence and charity who believes he can perceive potential good in even the most depraved young women.

Walsh frames this moral tale in the few known facts of the real life of the Reverend Harold Davidson (1875-1937), for a quarter of a century the rector of the country parish of Stiffkey and Morston in Norfolk, who spent most of every week in London in the 1920s and early 1930s, trying to save girls from poverty and prostitution. The novel’s mysterious title is the last line of a 19th- century jingle about ‘A Working Girl’s Life,’ measured by the days of the week: ‘Where will she rest from her tears and moans?/ Sunday at the Cross Bones,’ the London prostitutes’ own graveyard.

Walsh daringly begins the story at the end, in 1932, when the man he calls his ‘damaged hero,’ about to be formally defrocked in Norwich Cathedral after a nationally notorious trial in Church House on charges of immorality, is being exhibited in a freak show on the front in Blackpool.

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