Facing the Tank by Patrick Gale

for the final hymn.
    There had still been a cheery queue at the west door waiting to shake his hand after the service, but certain key faces had been missing and he had walked home with a heavy heart. The next day, predictably perhaps given the number of quondam shorthand typists that had been present, he was quoted word perfect in The Sunday Times. The Times carried a similarly scandalized piece on Monday as did The Daily Mail. The Guardian put the same quotations to opposite ends. Rather than write the replies and explanations demanded by each paper, he had agreed to air his views on a television debate later in the week.
    Gavin took a short cut across the quire to the Patron’s chapel. Saint Boniface of Barrow (pron. Brew ) was reputedly a Viking who, while leading a raid on the original Saxon abbey of Barro , on the hill where Barrowcester now stood, had been enveloped in a dazzling light. From the middle of said light he launched, on divine prompting say some, not surprisingly say others, into the Lord’s Prayer. This rousing combination of fireworks and linguistic virtuosity (for notwithstanding the date he had, of course, prayed in English) converted his hordes to Christianity on the spot. When the light dissolved, their leader had lost his sight. Legend further had it that he became Abbot. Depending on how far the pillaging had gone before the intervention of the light, he would either have done this straight away or nearer his well-behaved dotage, when he died a saintly death amid angelic clamour having swallowed a quantity of water when rescuing a child from the Bross. Under the Normans the abbey had become a moderately fine cathedral and under their descendants Barrowcester had grown into a sizeable market town and thence to a city, gaining the curious pronunciation of its name along the way. In the late 1960s an unpleasant French historian had been allowed the freedom of the Cathedral’s superb library for an entire summer, only to emerge declaring that the ‘cester’ bit was the result of a typographical error in the early seventeenth century. He left in a hurry and was not greatly missed. Tradition also had it that the original Viking settlement was responsible for a smattering of curious local surnames and for a local Scandinavian colouring known as ‘Barrowcester blond’.
    No one was certain when he had been canonized, but the reformed Viking butcher had been the city’s patron since at least the eleventh century, for the rood screen and the tympanum bore carvings of his good deeds. He was traditionally portayed as a giant of a man with a ball of fire in one hand. An illumination in a fifteenth-century chronicle of Barrowcester embellished the image with an equally fiery shock of blond hair. His final resting place was a stark box of rough-hewn local stone in one of the few sections of the Saxon abbey untouched by the Normans. Whatever their master builder’s plans, it was plain that his workmen had a profound reverence for the tomb’s totemic force.
    Boniface had worked no miracles since his death apart from an incident in 1908 when a small boy fell into a city cesspit and was saved from an unsavoury death by a pair of hands that hoisted him back to safety. Said boy swore they were the hands of a blond giant and went on to become Dean. Medallions of the saint had since become popular around the necks of local potholers and sanitation engineers.
    Like several of England’s greater churches, the Cathedral was built on unstable ground; a massy challenge in faith to Nature. Barrowcester’s hill was riddled with caves, streams and uncharted passages that tended to make their presence known in a dramatic fashion. A cottage would move a foot in the night, a herbaceous border would fold in on itself. Occasionally whole houses had collapsed. An attempt in the late nineteenth century to drive a railway through the hillside had ended in tragedy with many workers buried alive and several children maimed by a