When, on that fatal morning, the rector began to ascend the pulpit, his army boot missed the second step. He did not fall, but just failed to bring the pulpit down, the disappointed children reckoned. Mrs Wakeman closed her eyes in pain. It was Miss Docker, though, who barely resisted rushing to her rector’s elbow.

Never after was Miss Docker able to remember the text he had chosen for that morning. At the time she was too far gone in a state of extraordinary anticipation, not to say exaltation.

The rector was preaching about sin.

Not surprising. It is always with us.

The sin of goodness, the rector inferred.

Then Miss Docker sat forward in her pew. Mouth open. In despair. Because, not only was Mr Wakeman, poor man, a terrible preacher, he was all mixed up besides.

‘Take a pumpkin,’ the rector preached. ‘Have you ever noticed an ordinary pumpkin?’

Then Miss Docker did something she had always secretly wanted to do. She sat forward. Heart squelching. She answered a rhetorical question in a sermon.

‘Yes, I have,’ Miss Docker answered. ‘But why pick on a poor pumpkin? If it had been a gramma,’ she said. ‘Ugly shapes! Or choko. All those prickles! But a pumpkin is not what you’re looking for.’

As, indeed, the rector himself realized at once. Pumpkins will light lamps of splendour perched on iron roofs.

‘Not all the sin in the world will persuade me that the pumpkin,’ Miss Docker pursued.

The rector was hanging over the pulpit. Smiling. As if about to stretch his arguments to reach some distant point of ghastly jollification.

‘Take the leaves’ – his hands were demonstrating – ‘on which the tell-tale spores of mildew and blight will settle in the best of summers.’

‘Not if you spray,’ Miss Docker corrected. ‘But people will not take the trouble. I,’ she said, ‘if I gave the time to planting pumpkins, would also take the trouble to spray.’

The rector’s hands were involved with a problem. They had taken over from his mouth.

‘Spray, spray!’ Miss Docker insisted. ‘Spray and pray! It is prayer that saves pumpkins, as every clergyman should know and preach.’

Children’s giggles fell and scattered in and out the empty pews. But the Furzes and the Bleekers, who were deaf, they were listening to a sermon.

So Miss Docker continued.

‘It is all personal. Everything personal. For and against. Take prayer, for instance. Or sin. And God. What I mean is: I am God if I think I am. Only I would not be so bold. And sin. Sin is what you make it. On the cold winter evenings, I am knit up, knit, yes, knit, in my warm jacket That, that is prayer. Don’t you see, prayer is protection?’

But nothing could save the rector now.

‘Oh, I could tell, if I could tell!’ Miss Docker shouted. ‘But failure is not failure if it is sent to humble. The only failure is not to know.’

Illuminated at last, the rector fell forward in a blaze of pumpkins.