A Welsh funeral

Last week I found myself in church for the first time in years. The little baptist church in North Wales has stood for 150 years in a village a few miles from where my fianc é e ’ s parents live. It ’ s here where her grandfather Hadyn, who died last week aged 95, will be remembered. 

Pen-Y-Cae is a small village. Just a few hundred metres from the baptist church stood another: St.Thomas ’ s. Built in 1878 to offer spiritual guidance to its parishioners, it is now defunct; its sole function now is as a burial ground. This is where Haydn was to be interred.   

The hearse had barely got going before we pulled up outside the church. The abandoned building showed visible signs of its own demise. Punctuated with holes, the concrete path that led to the graveside had worn thin. As his four sons took up the role of pallbearers, I nervously began to grit my teeth as the coffin traversed the narrow rickety road. His widow reached out her hand and clasped it around my arm. Whether this was out of anxiety or love I am unsure. I am told she thinks the world of me. 

Pathetic fallacy has a way of kicking you when you ’ re down. In the final days of his life, I found myself looking up to the sky. The constant rain — perhaps a joy to my tomato plants — gave those last days a sense of foreboding. Now, a week later, as we found ourselves on a train heading to his funeral, the sun shone brightly. Heading west on our seven hour journey, I noticed the grass from a train window. Lush and verdant, stretching as far as the eye could see, it looked like a blanket draped over the countryside. Flowers were blooming and newborn lambs filled the fields. Then it hit me. It ’ s Spring. Everywhere I looked, I was taunted with the reminder that life was remerging from its seasonal hiatus.

The reading in church was from the Book of Job, verses 24-26. The message was about holding onto faith in the face of great suffering. No matter how much we suffer, or how much our faith is tested, we must have trust in the Lord.

As an atheist, I would find it easy to dismiss the indefatigable belief in faith. Yet there is something I find deeply compelling about religion. That small baptist church which could only hold twenty or so people was full to bursting. It wasn ’ t simply the presence of a large family, there was a sizeable contingent from Haydn’s church. His sense of belonging — his very sense of self and identity — was irrevocably intertwined with the church. He devoted his life to serving the God he so fervently believed in.   

This may sound strange coming from someone who often writes about the problems associated with identity politics. But here lies the difference. Where one divides and alienates, the other brings people together. A sense of community is a powerful thing. Those rooted in a specific place, holding traditional values, come from what David Goodhart calls “somewhere”. Make no mistake about it: Hadyn (a.k.a “Taid”) was a Somewhere. 

The institutions that once provided the glue holding our fractured land together are in retreat. Chief among them is religion. According to data , average Sunday attendance has fallen to roughly 600,000 — fewer than 1 percent of the population. Church membership stood at 11 million in 1930; by 2025 it is forecast to be 2.5 million — a decline of more than 75 per cent.  

Marriage is another such institution. Since the Divorce Reform Act 1969, the liberalisation of divorce law has led, along with other factors, to fewer marriages. This year happens to be the lowest on record for heterosexual marriage. Fewer than 20 per cent of contemporary marriage ceremonies are now religious. Although separated by country, our two families ’ grandparents shared the same traditional belief in marriage. Both were married for some seventy years. 

The loss of faith and with it, the erosion of tradition, is an issue I ’ m sure will keep few awake at night. Yet without these things, we lose something special: a shared sense of unity. Ask anyone who has ever been to a sporting event or attended a concert: people need symbols and songs to rally round and support. The national flag of Wales is a prime example. For a vast majority of the country “the red dragon” (Y Ddraig Goch) is imbued with a deep sense of civic and national pride. Listen to fans sing ‘ Land of My Fathers ’ (Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau ’ ) and feel the hairs on your neck stand up.  Some traditions matter. As the great Welsh poet R S Thomas wrote: “ There ’ s no present in Wales, and no future, there is only the past.”  

Never have we craved continuity more. In recent years we ’ ve witnessed a sustained attack on our nation ’ s history. Patriotism, once defined by Orwell as “ devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” is now vilified by some for its supposedly “toxic” nationalism. Meanwhile other symbols of history — statues — have been destroyed by protesters in the naive assumption that doing so will erase past misdeeds from the record books. We must defend history from ideologically-motivated revisionists and protect art from censorious culture warriors. I am not a member of the Conservative Party, but I do at least see myself as culturally conservative. 

As a writer, one can only view things from a contemporary perspective. We all live in what W.H Auden called “ the prison of his days”. Yet I would like to think some of our least fashionable institutions will continue to exist. 

Hadyn and I never discussed religion. There was simply no need. We bonded over our shared love of cricket. Often bumping into each other in the lounge, we would sit down to lament the latest (inevitable) collapse of the England top order. At the weekend he would regularly visit my fianc é e ’ s parents house with his wife Eileen. As he grew older and his health began to wane, he had to use a hearing aid. It would be turned up so loud it used to shriek and make me jump out of my seat. It often made Sunday lunch sound like Motorhead tuning up before a gig.  

This got me thinking about the loss of my own father, gone now some twenty years. I wish we had shared a similar bond. You could attribute it to teenage angst or adolescent indifference to authority, but we never got on. Even as I sat by his bedside, hours before pancreatic cancer took his life, I remained utterly impassive. I tried to relate to him, but it was all in vain. Nothing. Just an indescribable feeling of distance inseparable from his existence.  

I don ’ t have much faith in the resurrection or in the promise of an afterlife. I am simply glad I got to know Hadyn. I just wish I had got to know my own Dad as well. I wish both were still alive.

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