IT was some miracle when Jesus turned that water into wine all those centuries ago but Peter Holzapfel has a few tricks up his sleeve, too.

In the pulpit of St Mary’s, Kempsey, near Worcester, the vicar of the parish will regularly transform a glass of water into a bottle of Guinness.

“This is not a pulpit,” he tells a giggling congregation. “It’s a mini bar.”

The water into stout magic has been a regular feature of this most unusual cleric’s wedding talks for quite a while but soon it will be no more. Because on Sunday, September 25, the Rev Holzapfel, son of a German prisoner of war but as Yorkshire as Geoff Boycott, is retiring from the ministry.

No longer will his flat northern vowels echo around the pretty little church, which sits in an idyllic leafy churchyard by a ford across Hatfield Brook, and already there are problems.

He said: “Aav-ad fook cumin’ up t’me asking ’Oo’s gonna burry me now, vicur?’ Aav-ad t’say as aye doon’t noo. Aye can’t keep cumin’ back. Woodn’t be fer on t’new un.”

It helps to have a Yorkshire/English dictionary handy when you’re talking to Peter Holzapfel but communication has never really been much of a problem for him.

He has an easy laugh, a smiley face and he gets on with people. In fact, congregation numbers have doubled during his tenure at St Mary’s, Kempsey, and the neighbouring St Denys in Severn Stoke.

Mind you, he’s well used to Worcestershire ways. He was ordained in 1983 and after spells as curate at St John-in-Bedwardine, Worcester, and then 10 years as vicar of St Michael’s in neighbouring Dines Green, he arrived in Kempsey in 1999.

He said: “I’ve been in Worcestershire for 30 years. I suppose you could say I’ve knocked around it a bit.”

Peter Holzapfel will knock about the county a bit more in his retirement too, because the family home will be moving to Bromsgrove, where his wife, the Rev Christine Holzapfel, is priestin- charge at St Godwald’s, Finstall.

It is an unusual surname to be cornering the market in religion in Worcestershire and harks back to his father Rudolf, who married Josie Heap, a Lancashire lass who worked in a slipper factory. Very Mills and Boon, the couple got together after she saw him riding past the factory on a farm wagon, wrote her name on a piece of paper and held it up. He responded by writing his on a Wellington boot.

The wedding was in the early 1950s and hit the headlines, because Josie was the first British woman after the war to marry a German in England.

Their romance might have been fairytale, what followed was anything but.

Peter said: “You must remember it wasn’t long after the war and emotions were still pretty raw.

People would spit at my mother as she walked down the road and shout at her across the street for marrying ‘a bloody German’.

“Dad couldn’t get a job for quite a while. No one would employ him.”

When their little boy started school at Todmorden, near Halifax, he got into playground fights because of his background.

Thankfully life hasn’t been so caustic in Kempsey.

“Looovely folk,” said Peter. “It is a big parish mind you, about 3,500 people so you get a really good mix of folk.

“Do you know there have been 235 baptisms in the 10 years I’ve been here.

“When I came I had a very strong feeling Kempsey was right for me and I hope I have been right for it, although I have had a very good team around me.”

There are plenty who will agree with that and while die hard traditionalists might sniff at his Guinness in the pulpit trick or the roistering performances on his bottle stand at the village fete, Peter Holzepfel knows the Church of England can be a hard sell in today’s world and you’ve got to give it your best shot, whatever that is.

That’s why he’s never been afraid to try something different, like his breakfast communions once a month when hot dogs, grilled bacon, croissants and “real coffee, not typical church coffee”, are served in a room just off the nave.

Or the family service he introduced led by a music group.

He said: “Folk asked me, ‘Are you going all happy-clappy?’. I said, well I hope they will be happy and sometimes I hope they might feel like clapping. But they knew I wasn’t going to go wild.

“We have had to try something to attract people to church. It’s just crawling with families out there and I would have been failing myself as a churchman if I was not wishing they could be part of something active here.”

In his retirement, Peter Holzapfel will have more time for his great hobby photography. He has already had several exhibitions in Worcester Cathedral and, as he pointed out: “People are always grateful for a retired vicar.”

So no doubt he’ll be called on to help out here and there.

In the meantime, he’s doing his final rounds in Kempsey, Severn Stoke, Croome d’Abitot and Kerswell Green among a flock who certainly don’t want to die now.