A SEPIA, half-lit day. Wild duck fly over, squawking and
honking. I am desultory: reading a bit of this, writing a bit of
that. I could have gardened, I tell myself. The white cat is a blur
against the window.
On Sunday, Christ is being presented at the Temple. He is 40
days old. They used to call it "the Meeting", i.e. of the child
with aged Simeon. They used to sing Lumen ad revelationem.
Not much lumen on the ancient farm at this moment, but
always plenty of revelation.
A friend has brought me the Akenfield chair, a mighty piece of
furniture, lugging it through the wet garden. It is made of various
woods from the trees where I used to live. Tim made it, and Jason
set it down on the brick floor, where it at once became part of the
old house. It is pale and heavy, and very hard. Could it bear a
cushion? Its puritan beauty might flinch from such indulgence.
Jason returns to his old farmhouse, where he is a wonderful
drawer of animals. Portraits of his ewes and cows look down on us
in the pub. Furniture-makers used to be called joiners. I must not
place the new chair near a radiator, or else what Tim has joined
together will come apart.
I observe it lovingly after he has driven away, thinking of how
it will outlive me, how it will fade and become worn, how a woman
will call her husband to move it. It has a small drawer at the back
in which I have put a card which says: "Tim Whiting made me,
2014."
The Suffolk poet Robert Bloomfield honoured his gate-legged
table with a poem. I see him bent over it, pushing his pen. He is
the first writer I ever wrote about - this when I was 15. His
famous work was The Farmer's Boy, a Georgian idyll,a
blissful view of life on the land, shorn of its hardships. He
receiveda fortune for it, but died penniless.
His long poem became an agricultural party-piece. Young men
would stand up in the pub and spout it by the yard. Or sing it.
There were singing pubs and non-singing pubs. Vaughan Williams,
collecting folk-songs before the First World War, asked a young man
to sing him a song so that he could write it down, but they were
both thrown out of the bar by the landlord because it wasn't a
singing pub.
Now and then, I take a non-singing funeral. "Immortal,
Invisible" I announced the other day. A full church, but hardly a
sound. I could hardly say "Sing up!" with the coffin in front of
me.
Various reasons are given for these packed non-singing funerals.
Some say that the abolition of school assemblies has produced a
hymnless population. Gareth is doing his best, of course. But what
a loss. No "Immortal, Invisible, God only wise" - yet Nine Lessons
and Carols only a month ago, and in full voice.
But tears. Such tears from those who had not expected to cry.
Usually the mourners are worn out with hospitals and drugs, with
the ferocity of loss. The practice of religion brings philosophy as
well as faith. All these things fill the wide spaces of an old
country church for a funeral. The congregation is perfectly sad.
"And afterwards at the White Horse." And afterwards the expense -
£10,000, they reckon.
But enough of these wintry thoughts. A woman mounts the Temple
steps. She is holding a child.