The Cambridge Chapel Eurovision: Johns

The evening began (as so many of my chapel sojourns do) in a sprint up Kings Parade. (When will I learn?)

My very special guest star for the Johns service was my sister, Esme, who had come up from her Warwickshire countryside base to experience a bit of Cambridge life. I had the bright idea to squeeze St John’s College Evensong in before a formal. The plan was elegant in theory. In practice, Esme was still drying my hair at 5:55 p.m., and the chapel bells were already tolling. This meant that for my traditional run to evensong, I even had a mirror image beside me, the two of us, no doubt, looking something like escaped debutantes.

The mirror image in question.

Running in heels through Second Court is an experience I wouldn’t recommend. The cobbles felt almost personally vindictive that evening. But, against the odds, we made it, breathless, borderline-sacrilegious, dramatically but ultimately victorious, and just in time to slip into a pew as the organ thundered to life.

The chapel itself is, of course, magnificent. Entering St John’s always feels like stepping into a Gothic novel (the present building completed in 1869, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott): the height, the echo, the stained-glass black with the evening’s lack of light. The closest comparison I can make is the entrance of New College, Oxford, same abrupt verticality, the same impression that whatever is here is definitely better than you are. Yet John’s feels daylight-bright when you enter the main chapel, (I wonder who made the executive decision for reading lights instead of candles…?)

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There were no children in the choir for this evensong, just the Johns Gents. There’s something nice about an all-adult sound, and as the first notes of Sarah Henderson’s St John’s Service unfurled into the vaults, Esme looked over and me and nodded approvingly.

She then (somewhat sacrilegiously) leaned over (mid-service, may I remind you) and whispered that she actually “preferred” the John’s evensong to the morning Eucharist we had attended that day at Kings. I will not be repeating that kind of dangerous blasphemy at my own college.

The speaker was the chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, Rev’d Canon Mark Birch, on ‘Politics for the Common Good’. I have attended many college sermons, but this was the most utterly compelling I’ve ever heard. (One feels the latent glamour of a national institution when the chaplain to the Speaker shows up.)

Esme and I, ever the picture of reverence, decided to harmonise during the hymn-singing, a decision that lasted approximately eight seconds before collapsing into chaos. There’s something about singing next to your sibling that instantly dismantles composure; one glance across the pew and we were gone. The problem with hymns is that they demand eye contact avoidance of Olympic calibre, and neither of us possessed the discipline. By the second verse, Esme was shaking with suppressed laughter and I was pretending to read the music as cover.

There was admittedly certain satisfaction, too, in bypassing the porters at John’s, waltzing past the same people who might be considered the strictest porters in Cambridge. (They certainly are in my book)

The Music: (For my choral fans)

1. The Canticles (Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis) in the John’s Service by Sarah Henderson.
2. The Anthem: Biebl’s Ave Maria (1959).
3. Voluntary: Organ Elegy in B-flat (George Thalben-Ball)
4. Responses: Christopher Grey.
5. Psalm 119

Reflections

Walking out into the crisp Cambridge evening air, I felt that the entire sequence, the dash into the chapel, the light-filled Gothic interior, the brilliant sermon, the modern music, had given the Sunday evening a real gravitas. It was a lovely end to the weekend. The music resonated not just in the chapel but in the memory of the evening, in the sisterly experience, in the fleeting triumph of arriving despite our delay.

A drink in John’s Bar rounded off the experience perfectly. John’s Bar, in my view, is the best bar in Cambridge. I will never buy into the forced hate.

We were late. We ran. We giggled. And we heard great music. We were in one of the most distinguished chapels in Cambridge, in a service of almost ritual precision, and we left with our own little victory.

Until the next chapter of the evensong tour.