Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Pennick ·
The Guest at the Gate
At every funeral held in Pennick one mourner takes a place at the gate for the whole of the service, and the parish has learned to lend them back without a word.
- status: folklore
Ask anyone who buries people in Pennick — the vicar, the sexton, the woman who keeps the book at the crematorium gate — and you will be given one figure, and the figure is one. At every funeral a single mourner joins the gathering uninvited, takes the ground outside the gate, and holds it for the whole of the service: hat on head in sunshine, hat in hand in rain, never inside the rail and never at the graveside. On the one point where this parish agrees with itself, it agrees here. The guest comes from the next parish over. Borrowed, is the word we use. Lent across the line, the way you lend a ladder and expect it back clean.
Borrowed deserves some defending, because too many tellers have sharpened this thing. There is nothing ragged about the guest. Boots cleaned, coat brushed, dressed for the weather rather than the occasion. You could queue behind them at the Co-op on a Tuesday and think it nobody. The difficulty is only in placing the face. You half-know it. You spend the third hymn turning through your acquaintance, and just when the name rises — some cousin's neighbour, a man once queued behind at a christening over the water — the service ends, the gates go open for the cars, and there is no one left at the gate to check the face against.
The next parish over from us is Becksby, which is why I use the name; wherever you are reading this, substitute your own. The custom travels lighter than a hymn board.
Our rules have come down clean, which I have always thought the strangest thing about them, because a custom left in a parish for a hundred years ought to have gone dirty, and ours has not. They run so. You do not hold the gate. You do not beckon them in. You do not cross the yard to ask a name. If anything must be said aloud to them, it is that the gate opens at one. And you do not thank them, ever, because a borrowed thing is not a gift, and thanking closes a loan early.
Now the paper end, which is the end I trust, having kept books myself. Wally Prentice counted this parish's burials for thirty-one years, twice at every service, and his figure never rose for the guest. Counted out, he called it, the way you count out the man stood in the porch, and he entered the column honest. The Becksby register, same date, same weather, runs one higher for our dead than our own figure does. Their column. Their rule. No remark in the margin. So the guest is held to account somewhere, you see. Only not with us. My aunt said the arithmetic in these parishes is patient, and it makes its visits.
And it runs both ways, which is the part I would set before a magistrate. The year of the hard frost, one funeral out of our twelve stood with nobody at the gate. The only funeral in memory the guest has missed. Becksby's column that week sat as flat as ours; I have both lines in front of me, and the arithmetic kept its books that week better than we kept our people. Whatever sits at our gate keeps its side of the ledger.
Nora Peel will show you the coat if you buy her a sherry at the Anchor. She buried her husband in March, and at four that same afternoon saw the grey coat going up the flint road toward Becksby at a walk that would not be hurried. The morning before, she had stood at a graveside in Becksby, and the same coat had stood at that parish's gate the whole time. Left behind, she says. Like a book you leave at somebody's house and go back for the day after. I do not say she is right. I say she is the only one who has had the two halves of it in one pair of eyes, and she does not touch the sherry until she has finished saying it.
People ask me — I keep the visiting book at the gate now, took it off my aunt when her hands went — whether the guest is a judgment on us. Nothing so grand. The guest is bookkeeping. A funeral is a count, and when a parish comes up short of what the count requires, the parishes along this coast make each other whole; it is older than the incumbency and quieter than the bells. We lend what we lack, and are lent, and the registers somehow keep it square.
So the tale is held today the way it has always been held, by whoever keeps the book, and today that is me, at the gate, in the book's own ink. And the question I carry on the back page, past forty funerals now, never spoken above a murmur at the graveside: on the days this parish runs short, who is standing, hat in hand, at the gate of Becksby, waiting to be lent to us?