The Sweet Hymn

After Sunday School, the church elder asked me to stay on for a few minutes. McMum and McDad were hovering around having tea or something.

He had a small, grey, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a big microphone. My job was to stand there and sing a sweet hymn acapella for him to record. I did what I was told. I was a good girl.

As I sang, he held the microphone pointed towards me with a trembling hand. He seemed tall and portly in his dark banker's jacket and pinstriped trousers, and I was small and skinny. He had a thick bushy grey-blonde moustache above full juicy lips. I did not know where to look, and eventually I looked into his eyes, behind his gold rimmed spectacles. They were watering with a sort of yearning that I did not understand. A smile trickled about his mouth.

Afterwards he packed away the little tape recorder and said 'Thank you' and went off.

I knew something was wrong, and I had given him my voice to store away and listen to, but I had been powerless to refuse.

Years later at my sister's wedding in Edinburgh I saw him again, still clad in his black banker's jacket and pinstriped trousers. Everyone had left the church and made their way to the hotel where the reception was being held. I realised that he must have been quite young back then, even though he had seemed old to me. A very long, thick white hair was growing from the very middle of the bridge of his nose: just one.