|
THERE IS always a claimant quality in returning to where one once lived, be it ever so long ago. Thus I walk with a lingering sense of ownership around Aldeburgh. The day is dull, and the news on the car radio quite terrifying. So enough of both. And I have a friend to show around, Antony from far Pickering, the Rector of Richard Rolle’s lovely church.
We stand by Benjamin Britten’s grave. We stroll the Crag Path. We enter the wide aisle where boats were auctioned. We glimpse the sullen marshes where the author of Peter Grimes wondered how he could get away. We mount the Town Steps and plunge over the shingle to see Maggi Hambling’s majestic scallop shells fanned out against the steely sea.
We enter the Moot Hall, where the youthful me slept on a camp bed to guard the Millet drawings, and listened to the fall of the waves on to the shingle and scampering rats. We ate fish pie. We pottered around Thorpeness, and I saw in my imagination the memsahibs on furlough, and Empire missionaries taking a break, and boys reading William books, and dads in plus-fours, and the spirit of Sir James Barrie abiding. Never go back, they used to say. But I always go back, if only for lunch.
I have run the lawnmower into the ground, says Mr Walker critically. Heavens, have I? I apologise profusely. He takes it away to mend. I plant a row of purple broccoli, previous neglect of machinery filling my conscience. And then the swans pass over with mighty whooping wings, six of them in rose-white echelon, and I tell myself, why, Mr Walker gains from my hopelessness, so how dare he be cross with me! But he is a man who loves machinery, whose mind joins its mind and, money or no money, he is right to chastise a cack-handed machinery minder such as me. I wring off a fine marrow, pick up a huge apple, and think of — Thomas Traherne.
For it is just 18 years since Richard Birt, then the Rector of Weobley, founded the Traherne Society. Since when his lovely idiosyncratic communications from Herefordshire have alerted the world to the Rector of neighbouring Credenhill, that youthful priest who released the key to Christian delight.
Walking with Richard Birt up to Credenhill Church, Wales falling away to our left, I longed to sing the country clergy, past and present, known and unknown. Parsons like the poet-doctor-priest George Crabbe, who, calling at the Big House and hearing cries of labour, walked upstairs and delivered a fine boy.
And men like Thomas Traherne, who spelled out joy on the page and sent it to a single reader, a married lady veering towards Rome. If Anglican authority wouldn’t stop her, then Anglican bliss would. How he loved being alive!
The edges of the great field have been cut. So it looks as though it will be ploughed to the edges. The cyclic forces of food shortage and land prices determine these swathes of grass. Here lies an autumn hay harvest. And here, below the farmhouse, lies a carpet of crab apples.
And here, above it, the badger sett crumbles. And there, a mile away, spreads Suffolk. And now I must give Barry ten pounds for the church cycle-ride, and he gives me the date of the bellringers’ dinner. And again the white birds fly past, beating the sky.
|
back to Pastimes
previous story
|
next story 
%231%23.gif "Wordl Vision Sponsor a child Nov to Dec campaign © site")
