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Word from Wormingford
Ronald Blythe is reminded of two Hadleigh heroes
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A WEEK of proper toil as was fit for Lent 1. At the desk all morning with the sun hot on my back; in the garden all the afternoon with the sun fit for summer. My conscience struggles between global warming and bliss. Thousands of flowers are in bloom. The days pull out, as they say in the village. And the oil runs out. When I confess this to the oilman I receive a scolding. “You’re the 21st [fool, I thought he was about to say] customer to have said that to me today.” Soon, the special little tanker for tracks like mine creeps to the house, and soon the surprisingly bitterly cold rooms grow cosy. In church, I preach on the nature of deserts. They were burning all day and shivering all night. Those voluminously robed figures who cross and recross our screen every hour tell of sheltering from heat and chill for centuries. Cover up. It is midwinter, and I am dressed like Monty Don in India, as I dig and cut in jeans and shirt. And it is, as nobody can stop saying, February. Middle-aged friends arrive, and every half-hour one or other of their mobiles rings. They dive into handbag or pocket and say, “Excuse me,” and walk a little ahead or a little behind. All this about a dozen times. “Escape me? Never!” say the mobiles. In between, we talk about art. If one goes to a concert or to Westminster Abbey, one has to silence one’s mobile. Should not this be the etiquette when out to lunch or on a country walk? We are in an age, however, when few of us can bear to switch off, whatever happens to be switched on. I heard a funny play about this on Radio 4. A woman couldn’t switch off Radio 4. A demobilised artist friend paints to loud Verdi. Persistent questioning at a literary festival forced me to admit that I often wrote with a pen. In vain did I try to show a kind of advancement in my medium by telling the audience that Iris Murdoch and Ivy Compton-Burnett and Wilfred Owen used a pencil. As for the telephone, I use it sparingly, with the result that it rings sparingly. During an amiable talk at the local history society, the pencilled profile of Fr Hugh Rose suddenly enlivens the screen, riveting my full attention. I had frequently wondered what he looked like. He looked like Wordsworth. He was one of those Anglican priests who, like Herbert, haven’t all that much time to do what they were born to, dying at 43. In 1830, he accepted the Archiepiscopal Peculiar living of Hadleigh, Suffolk, disturbing its torpor. Rationalised religious philosophisings were being debated in Germany and, for some people, threatening traditional Christianity. What to do? Fr Hugh called the Hadleigh Conference, which in turn sparked the Oxford Move-ment. There was a fine brick Tudor tower in his rectory garden, and there W. Palmer, A. P. Perceval, and R. H. Froude set the seeds of Tractarianism. A previous Hadleigh priest was my boyhood hero — Rowland Taylor, the Marian martyr, burnt on the common in 1555. During his brief time there, Hugh Rose erected a wordy obelisk on the spot. I would prop my bike against its railings and imagine the terrible scene, the fat old man from Northumbria who had listened to Erasmus at Cambridge, and the horrible magistrate from over the fields who had slapped his face for saying his last psalm in English. And now the gentle Hugh the unifier. |
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