Weight of learning
THE Robinson family is on the move. After a decade in our little corner of rural Suffolk, we are packing up all our worldly belongings and taking them to a slightly less rural corner of Suffolk: wonderful Bury St Edmunds, a cathedral city disguised as a market town.
The beautiful new house has an area that we’re pretentiously referring to as “the library”, in preparation for which I have been going through my books in an attempt to thin out the collection. I can’t do it. My hand hovers over my medieval French texts — when am I next going to sit down to translate Chrétien de Troyes? — only to draw back again: what if I never again sit down to translate Chrétien de Troyes? Have my passions altered that much, or is it only my circumstances?
In the midst of this existential crisis, I recall the Master who moved into Christ’s College while I was a student there, and needed the floors of the Master’s Lodge strengthened because of the weight of his library. If it’s possible for the Master of a Cambridge college to possess too many books, then I suppose it must be possible for me; but I don’t think I’ve reached that stage yet. Chrétien is safely packed.
Sitting tenants
NEW occupants have already moved into the rectory — or, at least, into the garden. Over the summer, two escaped peahens took up residence in the village, and can often be seen wandering about on our garage roof or patio. They make sudden, unearthly noises that resonate across the valley, and sound either ridiculous, alarming, or rage-inducing, depending on the time of day or night.
Efforts to recapture them have been in vain; so they have become part of the furniture of the village, and as familiar a visitor as the hedgehogs, muntjac deer, and garden birds that we have come to know and love.
We will miss all the wildlife when we move into town. I just hope that the next rector does not assume that we left the peahens there deliberately, and attempt to return them.
Vile bodies
OUR new vicarage shares a garden wall with the Regency-era prison where, in 1828, the infamous William Corder was hanged for murdering his lover, Maria Marten.
The notorious “Red Barn murder”, with all its aspects of romance and horror, was being dramatised and immortalised in folksong even before Corder came to trial; interest in the case exploded after his execution, and sightseers flocked to take away pieces of the gallows, the barn, and anything else they could lay their hands on.
At that time, there was no building where the vicarage stands today, although the presence of a yew tree in the garden has already caused a friend to speculate that there may have been a prison burial ground (not for Corder, though, whose body was dissected and distributed around the country).
The friend suggests that I do some more research. I’m not so sure. I feel very torn between my love of local history and folklore, and my desire not to find anything unpleasant in the vegetable patch.
In the beginning
I ACHIEVED a goal from my author’s bucket list: a book-signing and storytelling session at Waterstones. It was everything I had imagined: a crowd of friends and strangers, a cosy hour of folk tales, a little queue of people holding my book.
A small boy approached and proffered the volume. “Did you really make this?” he asked. I responded that, yes, I was the writer of the stories. A pause while he flipped through a few pages with a puzzled frown. “But how did you get the writing so neat?”
As I helped him to catch up with the invention of the printing press, I remembered myself at his age, stapling together pieces of paper and designing front covers in felt-tip pens. Surrounded by printed books, I thought of the illuminated manuscripts that I had seen displayed at the cathedral not long before, every word neatly and lovingly scribed.
Sometimes, it takes the eyes of a child to realise how miraculous are the things that we take for granted.
Light perpetual
IN THE packing-up, I see not only our life loaded into the van, but the lives of generations. Our new vicarage will receive my grandfather’s desk, my grandmother’s sewing box, and books with inscriptions to my grandparents from their own grandparents.
So it was that I already had the sensation of history whistling past my nose when — as I sorted through a drawer of memorabilia — the announcement came from Buckingham Palace that the Elizabethan era had reached an end. It felt for a moment as if reality was crumbling: Queen Elizabeth II, the constant who had spanned all those generations, was gone.
As we walked down to the church to place the book of condolence, a double rainbow filled the Suffolk sky: age-old, scriptural symbol of endings and new beginnings, promise and peace. A rainbow, of course, is not actually the shape of a bow: that’s only our earthbound perspective. In fact, it is a full circle — an eternal ring of colours that exist all the time in white light, just hidden from our sight until we can glimpse them through the prism of the rain.
History is wonderful, but it’s nothing to rely on. The best is yet to come.
Amy Scott Robinson is a writer, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist.