Modern weddings

This ought to be, as the Bible put it, the time when the singing of birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

I don't know what the youngsters of today would make of that sentence, Americans especially, since the teaching of the Bible in the schools would clearly go against the constitutional ban on establishing a state religion. And it's pretty safe to say that the teaching of the Bible as literature is practically non-existent. Indeed, except among Orthodox Jews and Catholics, I find that in talking with young people it's better to skirt even the most homely references – the patience of Job, Samson in the temple – because they haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. 

A local board of education gave a group of 16-year-olds such a test with frightening, and sometimes hilarious, results. Cain and Abel were identified as a local law firm. Ruth amid the alien corn was a complete puzzle to most people though it was suggested by one that Ruth had left her native state of Iowa and was looking with contempt on the inferior crop of some eastern state. And that's fair enough, it's even intelligent if you remember that 'corn' in America is everywhere and always 'maize'. Corn, anyway, is what the linguists call a 'counter' word which is given to the staple crop in Australia, oats in Scotland, barley, they tell me, certainly in England, wheat. 

These biblical meditations came to me after attending a ceremony last Saturday night that was, at once, original and, to me, very reassuring. We’d been invited to the wedding of a girl we'd known since she was a toddler and, on the way, there, I said to my wife, 'I wonder what the service will be like.' 'I think,' she said, 'they've written their own.' I groaned a blasphemy. The last roll-your-own service I attended was in the hills of northern California – also, the wedding of a youngish man, about 30, whom we'd also known from birth. We were told to dress as we pleased and we were asked simply to follow a certain footpath through some woods and appear on the crest of Old Baldy, or whatever the hill was called, at two in the afternoon. 

Well, the footpath was invisible except to an Indian scout, and we staggered through broom and briar and scratched our way up to a clearing which had to be it because the scene bore all the marks of a traditional country wedding. I mean there was a youth with matted locks piping on a flute and another bare, to the waistband of his jeans, twanging a guitar and a half-dozen young men and women, sex indistinguishable till you got up close, were hefting a case of beer and another case of Fright, Scram, Fickle or some such soft drink for the teetotallers. 

There was also a middle-aged couple in grotesque uniforms. He was wearing a business suit, a shirt and tie and she was in a summer dress, or frock. They looked about as comfortable as an archbishop and his wife at a rock concert. They turned out to be the parents of the bride, a comely girl in some sort of Tibetan peasant's smock with beads down to her ankles. Those were the days when girls wore their hair down to their knees by the bow and to their coccyx astern. And throughout the proceedings, which didn't so much get under way as just lurch into a service, the bride kept parting these tidal waves of hair with the palms of her hands in order to see what was going on and also to respond without choking. 

The... I was going to say 'parson', but of course he wasn't a parson... in my time, he would have been a particularly sincere type of amateur actor playing John the Baptist in a school play. He had bare feet, worn jeans, a sort of smock, possibly the vestment of his mysterious order, but he also had a book. It was a book of poems by, of all true believers, W. H. Auden. Now this was encouraging. Perhaps they'd tried to write a service and given up and sensibly fallen back on some fine stretch of Auden. But the book was simply a crutch to the non-parson's memory. He opened it, looked through his beer-bottled glasses at everybody, just as solemn as any ageing priest, and he said, 'Well, like, shall we get going?'. 

He read about four lines of Auden and that was it. And then he took out from under the folds of his mysterious garment a sheet of paper and read what had indeed been written by the equally knavy, grindingly solemn couple. It did not repeat any of the well-worn and – in this setting, I gathered – highly suspect phrases of the usual marriage service. What he did was to read a sort of elephantine parody of them by somebody who seemed to have much the same ideas as St Paul but was determined not to show it. 

This couple, we were told, was about to enter a meaningful relationship, they were identified by their first names, they would live in achieved integrity (his prose, not mine), they promised nothing, there was no question of honour, love, certainly not obedience. They had chosen, he said, to finalise the concept of oneness. In fact, they were getting married. He declared them to be, not man and wife – a loathsome phrase – but two persons equal in marriage. 

That was it. The flute player piped away and the brooding guitar player, bent double over his guitar and mumbled something about touching your hand and the four or five adults present were enormously relieved. And we stood around talking to smocks and sandals and waves of hair being buddies, saying things like, 'You into sociology?' And, 'Sure, sure!' Then we unzipped the beer cans and somebody brought on an organic cake and we nibbled and said, 'Mm, mm!!' And thank God it was all over. 

Well, you can imagine my feelings when I pulled up at an awning in the mid 50s in Manhattan, an awning which looked like what we used to call 'a respectable apartment house' – block of flats, if we must translate – but turned out to be a Midtown club, mainly for tennis players. Well, that was square enough and maybe the service would be squarer. We saw arrows pointing to the wedding and went through subterranean passageways and up stairs and down corridors, and up again, and finally came out on a penthouse apartment with trellis work and chairs in rows leading to a lectern. And, out on the terrace, leafy decorations and (aha!) a bar. We were on time. 

I'm not, myself, a particularly punctual person but at airports and weddings I'm the first man there. My wife believes that you should pack your bags, sit down, take out a book and wait until the absolutely minimum time it takes to get to Kennedy or Heathrow or wherever. Then you whisk off in a cab, arrive, dash through the ticket counter and the body check, go aboard, they slam the doors and you're off! I, after 32 years, keep saying, 'But why not pack, get to the airport, then sit down and read a book?' It does no good. 

As for weddings, nothing to me is more uncomfortable than tiptoeing in and seeming to steal the limelight as the congregation swivels its collective head and hisses when the parson is already launched on 'Dearly beloved' or 'Well, like, shall we get going?' This time I won. The wedding was to be at 7.30 and we arrived in the penthouse suite at 7.20. There were three other people there. One man, a splendid cynic that we've known for years said, 'What are you doing here at this time? Sit down and snooze! Didn't you know this was a Jewish wedding?' The other two were a young man and an old man. They looked at their watches and looked at us with mild scorn as if we were at the wrong party. We sat down. And then I noticed that the lectern was draped in white silk bed sheets, or curtains, and I guessed that the marrying couple had not written their own service. 

The faithful must excuse me if I don't know the proper names for the objects and articles of the service, but soon a brass quartet started up, piping some charming Elizabethan music from Purcell and maybe Henry VIII – he was an accomplished musician and, after all, he is to the heathen practically the patron saint of wedding services. Then two men and two women came in bearing standards in their hands. When they got to the lectern, they stood at the four corners and a great, flapping blanket of cloth was suddenly extended into a canopy. The young rabbi came in, then the families, then the bridegroom, about 6 foot 4inches with a black yarmulke, and the tiny and exquisite bride. 

I couldn't pretend to call off the sequence of the ceremonies with any sort of authenticity. I could do it in accurate detail for another Gentile, or goy. I will simply say that in its insistence on doing things according to the traditions and wisdom of the Jewish people, it had great dignity. It was half in Hebrew and, in translation, I suppose, half in English and the shy couple repeated after the rabbi the vital phrases. 

Two things out of this fascinating ritual struck me. One was the new to me, and heartening, stress – in fact the rabbi said that it was the main thing, the sheet anchor of marriage – the stress on friendship. It struck me as being whole light years of wisdom beyond St Paul. 

The other was a sad, grim note and it was not the note of the rabbi or what he said, but what went on in my mind. And I hope I don't seem patronising in saying it. He made the slightest, glancing mention of the troubles of life and the trials of the Jewish people and, while this shy couple stood there, he looking like a giant trying not to hurt the pearl he was handling, I thought of a television programme that has just been shown around this country. 

It's called, 'Holocaust'. And no doubt, I hope, you will see it. It's a long and ghastly reminder of the six million Jews sacrificed by Hitler like pigs on a spit. There's been a furious correspondence going on in the papers about how this is too mild and that is too fictional and bitter protests, rightly, about the hideous taste of the intrusive commercials. But it did acquaint many millions, who never knew it, with the towering obscenity of our time. West Germany, I'm relieved to say, is going to show it. 

As I sat there watching this grave and traditional ceremony, I, quite uncomfortable occasionally, feeling very much amid the alien corn, I was glad that the young rabbi had mentioned the troubles of life and the trials of his people. I was happy that the young couple had not written their own service.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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