Some, most perhaps, knew the story of the desolation of St John’s. In small communities sexual scandal has a half-life as long and corrosive as radium. Tavanter had come to St John’s, his first parish, from Oxford in the spring of 1965. The obstacles in his modernizing path were formidable – the nagging poverty of his congregation and their almost pagan need for a style of religion he could not condone, let alone deliver. He had arrived with ideas of social mobility then popular in his theological college. He found a congregation which wanted a medieval preacher to take up residence in the manse with a suitable wife. They suspected his motives and eventually, worse still, his morals. For years they despised him while he fought to love them without hatred.
He blamed himself for hiding the truth. So, on Advent Sunday 1975, a bright day full of unforgettable yellow sunlight which managed to flatten a landscape already steamrollered by nature, he announced from the pulpit that he was gay. It was a life-defining moment and one he replayed with pride on the video tape that was his memory. In a single practised sentence he gained the authority he deserved, and lost a congregation. At the end of the sermon the hymn had been Bunyan’s ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. He had sung it alone.
They drove him out: not in the hail of earth and invective that would have been his punishment a century before, but by indifference and malice. He preached to an empty church for six months. On saints’ days they would gather within sight of St John’s across the peat fields to pray. He watched them, his vestments blowing uselessly in the wind, while they raised their voices in hymn. He left within a year after a pauper’s funeral which he had briefly prayed might be his own.
It was God or chance that arranged the next episode in John Tavanter’s life. By then he did not care if it was someone else’s God. He joined a team ministry in Stepney, in London’s East End, where he helped the poor who asked no questions. In 1983 he used his savings to buy a plot of land on the canal bank beside St Barnabas’s Church so that a youth club could be added to the Victorian church hall. It cost him £26,000: the land was of little value to anyone else.
Within a month the diocese had decided to close St Barnabas and merge two congregations at a new church half a mile away. Developers wanted the land for executive housing – the gentrification of the inner city was then beginning to gather pace. The only obstacle was Tavanter’s half acre. He sold for £750,000.
When it came it was a delicious moment. The solicitors handed over the cheque in their wood-panelled offices in Bow High Street. Cold rain ran in rivulets down the fake mullioned window panes.
£750,000.
The figure hung in the air despite the weight of its astonishing implications. He returned to Cambridge and founded a centre for the care of terminally ill patients with AIDS. He called it, in one of many acts of retribution, the St John’s Centre. In return for transferring ownership of the hospice and its financing foundation to the local diocese he was appointed team vicar for a group of six Fen parishes, based at the vicarage of St John’s. He used the rambling building as a centre for the carers of AIDS patients, in need of somewhere to escape the pressures of the deathbed.
It was a victory and John Tavanter spent most of the rest of his life trying not to glory in it. Those parishioners who remembered him treated him like a ghost.
Dryden and Tavanter liked each other in that kind of instant superficial way which can be the first step in a long friendship. Tavanter saw in the reporter a fellow outsider, someone who watched life as a spectator, a game devised for ordinary, normal people. Dryden recognized in Tavanter the wry attitude of someone estranged from society, and not entirely unhappy with the arrangement. When his mother died he chose Little Ouse for the burial. Tavanter had been matter-of-fact, helpful and humane.
They walked to St John’s in silence. In the porch a single electric light bulb shone on a squalid scene: cigarette butts, a few bottles of cider, two condoms and a syringe, in a nest of old clothing and newspaper.
‘Kids,’ said Tavanter, nudging the nest with his foot. ‘The syringe is for show. But one day it won’t be.’ He flicked an imaginary strand of hair from his forehead, a constant mannerism which reminded nobody of the thick blond hair of which he had once been sinfully proud.
‘Place must have changed,’ said Dryden, expertly leading his witness on.
Tavanter was aware of the reporter’s skills but trusted him: in the past they had talked privately about stories and the result had been sympathetic and intelligent.
‘Some. About two centuries in forty years. When I first came to St John’s they didn’t have teenagers. They certainly didn’t look like teenagers – they had the same windblown faces and hand-me-down clothes as their parents. But they dreamed then about the same mundane things: owning a TV, running a car, sex and marriage. I don’t think I married a woman at St John’s who didn’t turn out to be pregnant at the altar.’