Pat Spriggs.
5th July 2023
This weekend I went back to St Mary’s Church in Penwortham where I was a curate.
In those days the church had an active ‘Mother’s Union’. An organisation of elderly stormtroopers with a recipe for everything and no fucks left. I had been advised to watch my back with this generation of war babies by a friend at theological college who had said rather portentously, ‘’ Aye, The Mothers Union…They can smell fear!” .
But actually they embraced me. Their first woman priest. They loved me. Taught me how to make sloe gin. Mended my chewed teddy bear. Told me what was really going on. Chided and reminded me, when one of them was dying, that I needed to get my collar on, show up, and pray for a ‘quiet night and a perfect end’.
They each gave me a little bit of themselves.
Isobel made me tea and jam sandwiches at her kitchen table while I cried with exhaustion and stress. Maggie talked about her adopted children and the husband who beat her. Muriel went to Scotland and brought me back Loch Ness Monster spoons. Margaret Stirzaker, who I always saw as a fierce warrior of sorts, asked me if I thought she was dying . I looked at her and said I thought it was unlikely. I did overhear Arthur, her husband, in the last hours of his life, telling her he had loved her for fifty years. So she won at life, didn’t she.
Joan, a retired probation officer who made me a little pottery St Matthew that I still have, asked me, when she was dying in pain, if I would teach her to swear.
Then let’s talk about Pat Spriggs.
Audrey Patricia Spriggs.
God, How I loved that woman.
Housebound. Chain smoking. Her speech so apparently difficult to understand that people thought she was stupid . A mistake she used to her full advantage, the wiley madam. I would take her communion and she would reciprocate in the same way every week with a Nescafé coffee and three cigarettes lined up on the arm of my chair. Smoking a fag each, laughing like drains. My tittering and her phlemy rumble dispatching a morning for us both . Despite her being housebound they got her on the coach down to London for my licensing as a vicar . I received a text message while they were on the motorway. It said, ‘Pat is singing - and handing out sweeties’.
When I walked in to the church last Sunday they had all gone . Every last one. Some of them now names in the graveyard. All of them ghosts. They have left behind then an aroma of sturdy coats hung up to dry after the rain. Boiling kettles and half eaten packets of biscuits lying on the counter. Lancashire hotpot. Welsh cakes. Knitting. The prescription still waiting to be collected . The flowers now arranged by someone else .
I miss them all those women. That generation.
Bloody well done to every last one of them.
