| Terry has traced ours back to the 18th century — not there, but here in Suffolk. If he could have his life over again (he is at least 45) he would be a genealogist. He unloads his findings: a fat packet of Blythes, only a few known to me via family gossip, and most safely at rest in the births, marriages, and deaths registers until — in Queensland — Terry stirred their bones.
I am to take him where their dust lies. It is only just up the road — well, 12 miles. The sunshine polishes the hired car from Heathrow. The ladies on the back seat cry “Look, look!” as the yellow rape or a thatched house sizzles by.
I show them my birthplace, which was a thatched house until it burnt down just after the last war and is now a pair of neat bungalows. We glide on.
There is a shock — mine of delight, theirs of consternation — when we reach Blythe’s corner in the churchyard, the resting spot of all those rustics on Terry’s internet Domesday list; for, unlike most of the ancient graveyard, it is a waving meadow of cow parsley, bulldaisies, summer grasses, and lanky cowslips, the latter “paigles” to us. “Wildlife Area” says a card on a stick.
Through the wildlife, I can just see Uncle Fred’s cross and Aunt Aggie’s biscuit-coloured and shaped stone. Uncle Fred, who ploughed, fought on the Western Front, and fathered five children before he died at 25. Aunt Aggie, who gave us falls from her orchard, rubbing them on her skirt and showing us the bit that was safest to eat, a large old woman in a little house straight out of a picture-book.
Her house had a brick floor, an apple room, and a fire that never went out. Speckled photos of young soldiers hung on the walls, and polished brass shell-cases stood on the mantelpiece. The house was full of silence. When I last came to her grave, a sycamore tree was growing out of it.
The Queenslanders took many pictures with their digital camera. A gentleman seated by the church door was reading a book, How Jesus the Jew Became a Christian. I stood by the Victorian font where I was baptised — the medieval one lay outside, split in two. A pair of marvellously dressed men lay on either side of sanctuary, Sir Robert de Bures in glorious armour and Mr Jennens in periwig and ruffles: one all in brass, the other all in marble.
And there, between them, the folk in the Wildlife Area sang Merbecke and hymns about rest. How they toiled! But less so in May. In May, there was comparatively little to do on a farm, except to feed stock. Suffolk sheep were still in the meadows, ancestors, like us, of a local breed. But the yellow rape, the thatch, the hired car slowed down before them.
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