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THE entire village school is setting off on pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn, aka The Crown, as I write.
I should be with them, but have pleaded mortal sickness, having already pilgrimaged to the shrine of John Clare on Saturday, the altar of Mount Bures on Sunday, and to dear Bill’s funeral at Dedham on Monday. Somebody had to stay at home to write the books. But what a fib, when I am as strong as a horse.
I excuse it by reminding myself of all the virtuous things I have done concerning the pilgrimage: lent the children my best tambourine and thumbstick, a costume last worn by Paul Nash, and much excellent historical information.
Two holy priests, Henry of Wormingford and Kit of Wiston, will bless them on the way. There will be bread and water at Tom’s farm, a toll to cross the river bridge, pennants, a tall cross, and frequent singing. This is one way of getting these boys and girls out of cars and commuter dens.
I have composed a Franciscan prayer for them, and maybe I shall catch their song as they wind through the cornfields, all 20 of them, plus ten grown-ups. They have raided the vestry for cassocks and done their Chaucer homework. Who will be the Pardoner? Who the Wife of Bath?
They should have knelt before St Francis Preaching to the Birds in Wiston Church, but it is full of scaffolders. So it will have to be Mr Storey’s barn, a sacred enough place.
“When, nature prompting their instincts, small birds who sleep through the night with one eye open make their music — then people long to go on pilgrimages, and pious wanderers to visit strange lands and far-off shrines in different countries. In England especially they come from every shire’s end to Canterbury. . .”
It was cold and hot by turn when we went to Helpston to pay our annual homage to John Clare. We went to Maxey Mill, where the boy poet was sent by the landlady of the Blue Bell Inn to fetch flour, since it was a few pennies cheaper there. He was slight and fearful of the fenny will-o’-the-wisps. Flour is very heavy, like concrete before it is mixed. He lugged it along the dead-straight road.
Maxey Mill is made of Barnack stone, and has wooden shutters and ladders. Dust falls from it endlessly. We left it to visit Mrs Clare’s grave, where her great-grandchild Dorothy laid a handful of flowers.
Staring through the bus windows we saw Clare’s Northborough house, the one in which he was so unhappy, as it was all of three miles from his birthplace. It was for sale for more than half a million, and had trim lawns and a fine garage. And we paused briefly to just make out the grave in Glinton churchyard of the woman who became his muse, the now legendary Mary Joyce, who was burned to death.
“What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-the-otherness of the world,” said Seamus Heaney. And thus home, via the alternating borders of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, and Essex, the car flashing below vast containers ,and the harvest glowing in the late sun.
And so to Dedham, and Bill, once member of the General Synod, once our treasurer, and always one of those laymen who hold the Church together one way or another, and whose life is a pilgrimage without their knowing it. “A lot of work” is what he used to say when I told him what I had been up to.
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