Spare a Prayer for the Cherubs

by Rosemary Johnson

Most of us love Christmas carols.  Some readers will be planning to attend a service of lessons and carols at their local cathedral and I expect a large number of us will listen on the radio to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Cambridge on Christmas Eve.  Wherever we go, our hearts will melt at the sight of young choirboys/girls, robed in red, blue or black, processing in the half-light of flickering candles and singing in tones which are sparkle with resonance and sweetness.  Spare a thought for those cherubs.

For choirboys and choirgirls, Christmas Day will not be about stockings, presents and silly hats from crackers.  It will be a normal musical day, revolving around song school and services at their cathedral/abbey.  The thirty-five per cent of choir children who are boarders won’t be at home with their families, until after Boxing Day.  Those who are day-boarders will be haring up and down local roads in their parents’ cars, with the director of music (and probably matron) tapping their watches if they are a few minutes late for song school.  Most of them love it (although a few of them don’t).

My son, Alan (now thirty-two), was a chorister at Westminster Abbey in the 1990s.  Amongst other events, he sang at Princess Diana’s funeral.  From the moment, he was successful at the voice trial, at the age of nearly nine, his life and our life were taken over.  We used to drive from Essex to central London on Saturday and Sunday every weekend, with our daughter pre-teen daughter, for four hours after Evensong, sitting around in cafes, mostly Pizza Hut in Piccadilly Circus.  We made lots of great friends amongst the other choir school parents, but invitations from friends at home (including my daughter’s friends) had to be turned down.  Another mother and father travelled to the Abbey twice in a weekend from Cheltenham to visit their boy.  “If he can do it, so can we,” the mother said. 

Please pray for the choirboys and choirgirls who will sing for us this Christmas.  Remember their families sitting around the Christmas dinner table without them.  Please think of the choirboys/girls who don’t get to sing at Christmas (because they are the deputies (reserves) and those who have sore throats (like my son one Christmas).  Please ask for God’s support to those few choir children who don’t enjoy what they’re doing and don’t fit into choir school life.  Lift up the brothers and sisters of choirboys/girls who’d rather be at their friends’ parties, rather than sitting in their parents’ cars traipsing up and down this country’s roads.  Pray for those brothers and sisters, when they are overlooked by relatives in favour of the wonderful one. 

And – a bit of inside information – when you see the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, bear it in mind that the televised version was performed the previous midsummer. 

Rosemary Johnson has had many short stories published, in print and online, amongst other places, The Copperfield Review, Circa and Every Day Fiction, but not recently because she has been writing The Novel which she has now completed.  In real life, she is a part-time IT tutor, living in Suffolk with her husband and cat.  Her cat supports her writing by sitting on her keyboard and deleting large portions of text.