Shooter

Shooter is the fishmonger of Lower Binfield, the Oxfordshire market town where the narrator of George Orwell's Coming Up for Air grew up. He is remembered for one thing: he was one of the two men who led the singing in the parish church before the First World War, and between them they did so much of it that nobody else got much of a chance.

George Bowling, who tells the story as a man of forty-five in 1938, is remembering Sunday mornings when he was seven years old and had to stand on a hassock to see over the pew in front. The two singers sat opposite one another on either side of the nave, in the pews nearest the pulpit. Shooter was a short fat man with a very pink smooth face, a big nose, a drooping moustache, and a chin that fell away beneath his mouth. The other man was Wetherall, the joiner and undertaker, who was gaunt and grey and looked like a skeleton.

Their voices were as different as their builds. Shooter sang in a desperate, agonised bellow, as though someone had a knife at his throat and he was letting out his last yell for help. Wetherall had a deep churning rumble that sounded, to a child, like enormous barrels being rolled about underground, and you always knew he had more of it in reserve.

In the psalms they worked up a sort of call and answer, and Wetherall always had the last word. Shooter would roar out "The Lord is my shepherd", and Wetherall would come in with "Therefore can I lack nothing" and drown him completely. Bowling especially looked forward to the psalm that names Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan. Shooter got the first half. Wetherall's bass swallowed the whole congregation on the word Og. As a boy Bowling took the two of them for deadly enemies; as an adult he supposes they were friends outside church.

Shooter died in 1926 and Wetherall in 1928. When Bowling walks round the churchyard in 1938 he finds them lying opposite each other on either side of the path, as if they were still singing at one another across the aisle, and he wonders what sort of time Wetherall had in those last two years with nobody to sing against. Earlier the same day, looking down at a town he no longer recognises, one of the things he thinks about the strangers now living in it is that none of them has ever heard of Shooter and Wetherall.