A Vicar And His Son

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28216, 2 March 1957, Page 3

A Vicar And His Son

Picture a Country Vicarage. By Anthony Brode. Elek Books. 183 pp.

“Picture a Country Vicari might have served as an equally suitable title for this book. For much of the humorous anecdote that enlivens its pages derives from the odd situations in which vicar—who happens to be the author’s father, the late Rev. Reginald Brode—found himself from time to time. It is he who provides the life and soul of the book. His character is so delightfully drawn that one might almost say that he deserves a place with Henry Fieldihg’s parson Adams—not so much for what he said (he was anything but loquacious .as for what he was. Chapter by chapter, there runs through the book a rich vein of humour. At the commencement of the second chapter, the author, having stated that his father really deserved promotion but did not get it, amplifies his statement as follows: “But the Church of England bears a strong resemblance to the game of snakes and ladders, and somewhere in my father’s career was a square marked ‘Archdeacon Offended. Miss a turn.’ ”

But it is more than the bright remark that gives this book its piquant flavour. It derives no less from the humorous twist that is given the most mundane situation. Thus, when the author writes of stocking up for Christmas at the vicarage on a certain occasion, he has no sooner referred to “the extreme but erratic generosity of parishioners” than he proceeds: “We had come to expect, though gratefully, a bird from somebody or other as the month wore on, and usually we underestimated the supply. The year we didn’t my father’s nerve broke two days before Christmast, by which time all the poulterers had most unusually sold out.” “My father’s nerve broke” —how charmingly put! Some of the most delightful chapters in the book are those which have woven into them the author’s childhood memories of his father. In however humorous a light he -depicts his father the deep affection that he bore him is I implicit throughout. And it is this relationship as between father and son that lends the book a charm all its own.