Interview With Merrily Watkins

from The Times magazine

IN THE BISHOP'S SECRET SERVICE

She's a single parent who smokes '15… OK maybe 20 some days,' has to have her cassocks shortened and mumbles 'Oh shit!' when she spills her tea. Last summer she nearly quit her job after an exorcism went fatally wrong. JEMIMA LESSING meets the Rev. Merrily Watkins, Diocesan Deliverance Consultant.

YOU genuinely don't know what to expect. You've seen the films with those dour, laconic priests in black hats with doctors' bags containing flasks of holy water and a scuffed Bible. You tell yourself it can't be like this in real life and yet you're almost disappointed when it isn't.

Opening the front door of Ledwardine Vicarage - 17th century, crookedly timber-framed - Merrily Watkins is wearing a light blue sweatshirt and clutching a smelly rag and a bucket into which you can't help taking a nervous glance in case it's full of green bile projected across the room by some satanic seven year-old.

The Reverend Watkins smiles and raises her eyes in the general direction of heaven. 'Sorry about this,' she says, 'but the cat's just been sick…'

Her smiles tend to be apologetic and her eyes are full of a bruised humour. She is 38 years old, a widow with a daughter of 17. Yes, she agrees she was probably a political appointee in the first instance. A certain bishop of Hereford, who later left under a cloud, wanted a woman at what Watkins calls 'the coal face of Christianity.'

She means Deliverance - the comparatively new name for exorcism. It's not generally known that every diocese in the country must have a Deliverance Minister, whose job involves dealing with allegedly haunted houses and people who believe themselves to be psychically damaged.

This is probably the most derided and thankless role in the Church. 'In the movies, it's all over in a blast of dry-ice or whatever, and everybody's sobbing in relief. In reality, most times you really don't know whether you've been any use or not. Oh God, am I supposed to have said that?'