The hymn board is a wooden frame with slots, and the numbers are painted cards a churchwarden slides in on a Saturday from the list the vicar sends. On weekday mornings it is found set to four numbers that are not on any list, in cards from the box, and the four numbers are the four hymns of a funeral, in the order they are sung.
I am a churchwarden, and the hymn board is one of the small jobs I have done for twenty years.
How it is set.
The vicar sends the hymn list on a Friday. On Saturday I take the cards from the box in the vestry, slide the numbers into the slots on the board by the pulpit, and put the box back. After the Sunday service I take the cards down and put them in the box, so the board is empty in the week.
The church is locked from five until nine in the morning. I have a key, the vicar has a key, the flower ladies have a key between them.
On weekday mornings, three or four a month, the board is set.
Four numbers, in cards from the box in the vestry, in the slots, straight, the way I set them.
The same four numbers every time. They are not on any list the vicar has sent, and they are not hymns I would put together, and I did not know for two years what they were.
What has been checked.
The keys. Nobody has been in. The flower ladies come on Fridays and say so. The vicar has stopped being amused by the question.
The box. It is in the vestry, on the shelf, with the lid on, and in the morning the four cards are in the board and the box has four cards fewer in it, and the lid is on.
The church. The alarm was fitted in 2019 and it has never gone off, and the sensor in the nave covers the pulpit and the board, and the log shows it armed and quiet on the nights the board is set.
The cards. Ours, from the box, with the small chip on the eight that has been on our eight since I have been warden.
The four hymns.
I looked them up in the end, because four numbers that keep coming back deserve a name. They are the four hymns from the order of service of a funeral held in this church in 1987, which is in the parish file with the service sheet in it, because the family gave a copy for the record.
The order on the board is the order on the sheet.
The funeral was the previous churchwarden's, the one who set the board before me, whose job this was for thirty years before it was mine.
What is done about it.
I take the cards down when I find them and put them back in the box, and I have told the vicar what they are, and he was quiet for a while and then said that the previous warden had set the board for his own wife's funeral and had not been able to do it for his own, and that perhaps somebody was making that right, and that I should leave them up if I found them.
I do not leave them up. I take them down. It is my board.
What I do.
I set the board on a Saturday.
The one thing I have changed is that I keep the box in the vestry cupboard now, which locks, and I have the only key.
The board is still set. Three or four mornings a month, four cards, the same four numbers, from a box in a locked cupboard, and the cupboard is locked in the morning and the box has four cards fewer in it.
The reason I lock it is not that. It is a Saturday in the winter when I was setting the board for the Sunday, from the vicar's list, with the box open on the front pew, and I slid the last card in and stepped back to check them, and the cards were not the vicar's numbers. They were the four. I had set them myself, from the list, in the right order, watching my own hands, and the board had the four on it, and the vicar's cards were back in the box.