The Times Magazine 27gradually becoming too sick to play them,
storing them in the garage, before finally
collapsing one night, at 2am, in a pool of
blood and vomit, and dying two weeks later.
Wholly inappropriately – this is not my
sorrow – I find myself stroking David and
Richard’s dachshunds, Daisy and Pongo, and
crying. I can see why Coles is leaving this
place. David is everywhere. And yet... gone.
“I know,” Kate says, looking me in the eye.
“I know. So f***ing unfair.”Coles, 60 now, is an intriguing paradox. To
those who follow him on Twitter (470,000),
or listen to him on Radio 4’s Saturday Live
(2.4 million), his life as a vicar at St Mary’s,
and Finedon itself, are semi-mythic. His
regular updates about Finedon’s evensongs,
baptisms, funerals, jumble sales and bell-
ringing sessions allow anyone who follows,
reads or listens to him to live in a virtual,
parallel, almost lost England that somehow
merges with James Herriot’s Darrowby or
Miss Read’s Thrush Green. His very presence
flatters our notion of Englishness. A gay
former pop star – the Communards’ Don’t
Leave Me This Way is part of our bangers
canon – who is now a safe pair of broadcasting
hands at the BBC. Yes, we are the kind of
country that has a famous, groovy, pop star
vicar – as eloquent, wry and well read as
Stephen Fry, who literally rides around the
village in his surplice on a sit-up-and-beg
bicycle. I’m pretty sure there are American
billionaires who would, if they were allowed,
buy him for their home town – like they
bought London Bridge. To import a bit of
heritage, eccentricity and class. At first glance,
he is an almost parodic if quirky part of
the establishment.
However, to read his memoirs, Fathomless
Riches and Bringing in the Sheaves, is to enter
an earlier life of emotional turmoil, sex, drugs
and rock’n’roll. Coles came out at the age of
16 – after playing Tom Robinson’s Glad to Be
Gay to his mother four times in a row (Mrs
Coles: “Are you trying to tell me something,
dear?”) and then attempted to take his own
life two weeks later. He spent months in a
psychiatric facility, before moving to London,
forming the Communards with Jimmy
Somerville, and becoming a founder member
of Red Wedge – the socialist pop-culture
movement that sprang up during the Thatcher
years. In the midst of the Aids epidemic, he
lied about having HIV himself – something
which, when discovered, led to him falling out
with Jimmy Somerville for years, and which
still clearly lies heavily on his conscience. He
seems not to forgive himself easily.
In the midst of all this febrile bacchanalia,
however, one pivotal thing happened: the
Communards’ manager, Lorna Gradden,
made Coles sign up to a pension plan.This is why now, 40 years later, Coles can
afford to retire, to the same village Gradden
lives in. “I have enough to buy a cottage and
write a book a year. I am comfortable. To be
truthful, most vicars are not able to do this.
I know how fortunate I am.”
We are sitting in the summerhouse,
in the vicarage garden, doing our interview.
Before Coles sits on the sofa, he throws six
or seven cushions on the floor. “David was
obsessed with them. The interior designer at
my new house has banned them. It will be
very... minimal.”
At 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, the
removal truck will leave to start Coles’ new
life in Sussex. Friends Grayson Perry and his
wife, the author and columnist Philippa Perry,
live on the same street, and chef Marcus
Wareing is down the road.
“It feels like there will soon be a reality TV
show about it – Celebrity Village,” Coles notes,
amused. He had hoped to keep his new life
fairly discreet, “but the bloody Daily Mail
published a picture of my new house yesterday,
so I guess that’s not happening. I don’t know
how they worked out where it is.”
I read the Daily Mail piece. The tabloid
Sherlocks revealed how much his cottage
cost – £950,000 – and noted, approvingly,
“A high-class delicatessen competes with
a nearby Waitrose supermarket to provide
groceries for the well-fed residents.”
This is where Coles will begin his new
career. While he hasn’t given up priestly work
entirely – he is doing outreach work in prisons,
not a soft option – his primary jobs will now
be broadcasting and writing. This is why I’m
here today: his debut novel, Murder Before
Evensong, comes out in June, the first in a
planned series of Canon Daniel Clement
mysteries, where a delightful, liberal vicar
solves a series of Midsomer-style, unfathomably
brutal murders in an otherwise idyllic village.
A sort of Richard Osman/Miss Marple vibe.
While the vocabulary and reference
points are archetypal Coles – I venture that
no other book published this year will feature
the words “aumbry”, “sedilia” “lustration”,
“chthonic”, Heidegger’s erasure theory,
“narthex” or “hypostatic union” – the
character of Clement himself is intriguing.
One presumes he’s at least partly based on
Coles and his experiences as a village priest,
but it’s notable that Clement has to be so
reasonable, so mild, so uninflammatory and
so flexible around the opinions and needs
of his parishioners that he floats almost
like a ghost through the book. One of
the subplots is that Clement, a quietly
modernising priest, wants to install toilets
in the church to make life more comfortable
for the congregation, but some of the most
stridently traditional parishioners are so
horrified by the idea of change (“The pews!his books, complete with squat wood burner
and copper kettle. He built the beautiful
outdoor pizza oven, and the vegetable plots
and the pergola. The garden itself is, right
now, breaking into its spring riot: tulips;
euphorbia; forget-me-nots. A vast cherry tree
is raining pink blossom onto the lawn. In
The Madness of Grief, Coles talks of how
David died at the end of 2019, and then, as
spring rolled around, Coles sat alone and
watched the garden slowly spark alive with
David’s genius planting: “One last bouquet
from my love.”
Having read Grief, I know how much
terrible, terrible sadness this beautiful house
and garden have seen. Cole describes, with
the fury of the bereaved, David’s decline
and death: the awful waste of the man who
collected bagpipes, mandolins and harps,
With his late partner, the Rev David ColesColes in the Communards
with Jimmy Somerville
in the late EightiesWith Dianne Buswell on Strictly Come Dancing, 2017